Roland has a nice line of mesh head electronic drums with their V-Drum line. The top of the line at the moment is the 10 inch PD-125SX dual trigger pad – which costs a whopping $429. It’s a nice trigger but I don’t need the dual zone. it’s also only 10 inches. I’d rather have a full side snare of 12 or 14 inches.

So let’s build one.

Considering I don’t need anything special for a drum shell, I scoured Craigslist for an old snare drum. I found a couple but nothing as cheap as a brand new Sonar snare for $40.

Brand new Sonar snare for $40

The other things I’ll need are;

1.) Snare stand – about $50
2.) One Piezoelectric 35 mm element – 65 cents at the local electronic shop.
3.) A bit of wire and shrink tube – a buck or two.
4.) One 1/4 inch mono phone jack – $1
5.) 3 metal “L” mounts – $1 each
6.) Some foam. I used the ridged foam from a sanding block – $1.29
7.) Fibreglass screen door mesh – $10
8.) Double sided tape – About $3-4
9.) A 5/16th carriage bolt, a few nuts and washers – $5
10.) 3mm beading wire (found in the arts/crafts section of a store) – $2

Let’s try and put this thing together.

The Drum Shell

I removed the skins and hoops....

...and pulled off the snare strainer. I won't be using this on the electronic drum so I'll pack this away for another project.

The idea is to mount the Piezoelectric element under the centre of the drum skin (which I’ll do with the carriage bolt and washers). I’ll need to cut a piece of wood to mount this on. I set the drum shell on a piece of paper and figured out where I want to put my “L” brackets. I traced around the whole thing.

Tracing the shell and brackets.

This is what I have to work with.

A few squiggly lines and I have a template for my wood mount.

To make things easy I’m going to use the lug mount screws to hold my “L” brackets. no need to drill extra holes or use other screws.

Mounting the "L" brackets

All three brackets are in.

My wood mount is cut and spray painted silver. I painted it silver because I noticed a can of silver paint when I was cutting it out. If I had some black paint, it would have been black.

A few wood screws on the underside to hold it in place.

This is the bolt/washer contraption I came up with to hold the piezo in place. The carriage bolt and locking nuts give me some flexibility in the hight and allow me to adjust it later. The washers on the top are held with 3M double-sided tape.

The Electronic Bits

The electronics are really quite simple. One piezo is wired directly to a phono jack. The piezo acts as the trigger. You can not mount the piezo directly to the drum skin or it would be damaged. A bit of foam is placed between the piezo and the skin to transfer the energy of the drumstick hitting the skin to the piezo.

Looking on-line I found several people using different products to transfer the energy. Several people mention using the foam found in sanding blocks. On my trip to the hardware store I looked at various foam products that could be used (pipe insulation, ridged insulation, etc) and the sanding block foam seemed to be a fairly good and cheap choice. I decided to give it a shot.

My I wired up my piezo to a standard 1/4 mono phono jack. I added a bit of heat shrink tubing to keep things tidy.

I didn’t think it would matter which way the piezo was wired so I tested it both ways.. it didn’t seem to matter.

The 35 mm Piezo and 1/4 phone jack.

Wired together. I ended up having to change to another style phono plug. You'll see why in a moment.

I’m going to need a place to mount my phono plug. My first thought was the air vent already in place on the snare drum.  The drum shell was too thick for my phono plug to poke through and fasten the nut in place. What I needed was a nice faceplate.

Oh look! A nice faceplate!

I unscrewed the faceplate, flipped it over, and bent it so it curved with the drum. I drilled a hole under where the faceplate would sit and drilled another hole in the faceplate for the phono plug. Due to the thickness of the drum shell and the size of the faceplate, I swapped out my instrument standard phono plug for another style which wasn’t quite as wide. It fit perfectly.

Phono plug mounted on the faceplate

Now it is time to mount the piezo and foam. I cut the sand paper bits off the foam and cut a block about one inch square. I tapered it a little so it was smaller at the top. I adjusted the piezo mount so the foam block was just over the rim horizon.  Then everything got mounted with double-sided tape.

The piezo element fixed on the mount with double-sided tape.

Foam block mounted on the piezo with double-sided tape.

Building the mesh skin and putting it back together

I’m going to use several layers of fibreglass screen mesh for my drum skin. Two layers will be sewn to a ring and two layers will be held in place over that with the hoop.

I'll use the ring from the skin which came with the snare. Let's just cut that thing off.

Two layers of screen are sewn to the ring with 3mm beading wire.

The new 2 layer mesh skin is fitted on the shell...

...and two more layers are placed on top.

The hoop is put on and tightened. I then trimmed away the extra fibreglass screen.

I wanted the bottom hoop on the snare. The lower skin made a bit of noise when I hit the top skin so I cut a few holes in it and dampened it with felt.

And that’s all there is to that…

One finished, full size, electronic snare pad.

I did a bounce test (dropping a drum stick on the skin) comparing this drum to my regular snare drum. The bounce back is pretty much the same.

I hooked this pad up to my Roland TD-5 and it worked well. I had to up the sensitivity just a little but it plays perfectly.

I found a small discarded Telus traffic cone outside the office. I figured this would make a nice base.

I salvaged a seized 120mm fan from a server and re-lubricated it. Once it got warmed up it stopped making that noise (you know, that noise). Good enough for personal cooling I thought.

There is a stack of old and dying Cobalt web servers from the early 2000′s in the office. None of these will ever be used in production – or anything for that matter. Most have been gutted and the cases converted to shelves. There is now a box of old, but working, Cobalt 12v power supplies. These are cool power supplies because they’re small with a single MOLEX connector and power switch. Again, good enough for personal cooling.

I cut a hole for the power receptacle and switch.

Stuffed the Cobalt power supply inside.

Mounted my refurbished fan on the top with a zip tie.

Now I can stay cool at work.

With a 10x or 8x binocular, the volcano will fill the viewfinder. If only I could have a webcam with a binocular attached.

Thus,. this project.

I’m going to pretend for a moment someone else out there would like to use this as a guideline for building their own Volcano Nocularcam so I’ll sort of write this as a step-by-step guide.

Things you’ll need.

1) Cheap webcam
2) Cheap binoculars
3) Styrofoam
4) A bottle of Hydrogen Peroxide
5) Duct Tape (of course)
6) Matte Knife*
7) Screwdriver*
Hammer
9) Dremel tool**
10) Permanent marker
11) A computer or something for the webcam (duh)

* or handy Leatherman
** You won’t really need a Dremel tool for this project. I only included it in the parts list because every other mod project online lists one.

STEP 1

Acquire some cheap binoculars. I found mine (8×21) at Toys-R-Us for $10.

Turn your binocular into a monocular by removing the left, umm,. nocular. The one I bought had a couple screws on the inside. I removed the screws and yanked the nocular off.

STEP 2

Acquire a cheap webcam. I found one at Target for $29.

Carefully remove the pretty outer case. You won’t need it and it’s much geekier to remove electronics from their housings anyway.

A word of warning: Broken plastic pieces can be sharp and you just might cut yourself. Use the hydrogen peroxide to clean your wounds.

STEP 3

Install the software for the webcam and point the webcam lens through the eye piece of the nocular. You’ll have to play around a bit with the focus on the webcam (if it isn’t fixed focus) and the focus on the nocular. I adjusted mine to focus to infinity and beyond.

On my binoculars there was a middle focus dial. It stayed attached to the other section when I yanked this nocular off. The red arrow points to a slide adjustment for focus. Later, I’ll need to adjust the focus and then secure it so it won’t move.

I’ve more to do so I won’t bother at this point.

STEP 4

I’ve got the camera element and the nocular ready to go. When I was playing with the focus I found the thing is rather touchy when it comes to alignment. A little off one way or the other and the image catches the side of the nocular lens. We need to avoid this somehow.

At first I thought of gluing the cam lens directly to the nocular eye piece. I figured there was a level of error involved in this. Glue on either lens (which are plastic) would end this project straight away.

I decided to secure the nocular and webcam in a housing of some sort.

As I was cleaning the cut I received from step two I realized I was holding the perfect housing. A hydrogen peroxide bottle.

Here is my idea: The lens of the nocular will stick out the top, holding it perfectly center to the webcam elements which will be mounted on a circle of Styrofoam cut to fit inside the bottle. How perfect is that?

First things first. Cut the bottom off the bottle along the raised ridge. This will allow us to fit the bottom back on later. A little duct tape around the bottle will give us a snug fit and should hold the bottom on nicely.

Fit the bottom back on. Make a mark near the edge of the bottom piece. This is where we’ll want to cut a small hole to feed the webcam cable out. I cut a small hole the size of the cable and then made a cut from the hole to the bottom of the bottle. This way I can slip the cable through the cut and later cover the cut with more duct tape.

(Re-reading that doesn’t make much sense,. but perhaps it does to you. There is a picture of this later for reference)

A word of warning: Be careful to not cut yourself as you are now out of hydrogen peroxide.

Next we need to cut a hole for the lens to stick out of. Cut off the top off the bottle. Place the nocular lens on top of the bottle and trace around it. I cut mine a tad smaller than I needed and trimmed to fit later.

The end of my binoculars had little rubber protectors. A bit of force and they popped right off. I cut the hole in the bottle to fit the nocular without the rubber protector. I figured I could slide the nocular through the hole and fit the rubber bit back on to help hold it in place.

Perfect fit.

This is starting to look just like a..
a..
ummm..?

a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

STEP 5

Now that I know how this is going to be mounted I’ll need to secure the focus on the nocular. I’m going to be stuffing the end through a bottle so I suppose I only need to stop the slide from moving back. It just so happened a zip tie stopped it from moving back at the perfect focus point. Your mileage will vary.

STEP 6

Next we need a disk of Styrofoam to fit between our webcam and nocular lens.

Cut a hole in the Styrofoam just smaller than the nocular lens and another for the webcam lens. We’ll want these to fit very snugly as this is going to hold the two together.

STEP 7

At this point we should have all our pieces cut, fitted and ready to go.

A) Bottle bottom
B) Webcam
C) Styrofoam
D) Nocular
E) Bottomless and topless peroxide bottle
F) Rubber bit from the end of the nocular lens.

Let’s fit it all together and hope it works.

Now for the hard part. Stuff the nocular eyepiece and webcam into the Styrofoam and align it by monitoring the image on a computer. For me, this took a bit of fiddling and Styrofoam trimming to make everything align just right. Use duct tape to secure everything in place.

Once you’ve got it the best you can, stuff the lot into the bottom of your bottle.

I cut a small block of Styrofoam to wedge into the back of this mess to make sure everything doesn’t slide back once I get the bottom secured in place.

Oh yeah. Remember back in step 4 when I was rambling on about the hole for the cable. You can see it in the picture above.

Put the bottom of the bottle on.

TAA DAAA!

That’s it. You’re done.

Plug the webcam into the computer and make sure nothing slipped out of place and the image looks good. If it is you can add a piece of duct tape to hold the bottom on.

Once I was done putting this together it was too dark outside to test the image. I did happen to grab a shot of the microwave in the kitchen.

The microwave was only about 4 meters from me so it came out a bit blurry (remember my focal point was set to infinity and beyond). It’s also grainy as this webcam will need lots of light because it’s going through a few extra lens. It should work great for an outside daytime camera,. not so good inside.

Next Day Update: It was a bit hazy today to see the volcano. I did mange to snap a shot with the Nocularcam in the general area of the volcano. It looks like it still needs a little adjusting.

Next I’ll need to figure out a way to mount this. I’m sure it will have something to do with duct tape and zip ties.