A Portable Multi-Pitch e-Drum Based on Printed Flexible Pressure Sensors

Chun-Ming Lo , Tsung-Ching Huang , Cheng-Yi Chiang , Johnson Hou and Kwang-Ting Cheng Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9560. Email: { tonyloutw, ettrick, timcheng } @ece.ucsb.edu Flexible Electronics Technology Division, EOL-ITRI, Chutung, Hsinchu 31040, Taiwan-R.O.C. Email: { ChengYi, johnsonh } @itri.org.tw Abstract
Pressure sensors are ideal candidates for implementing portable digital music instruments. Existing commercial pressure sensors, however, are not optimized to meet both timing and precision requirements for acoustic uses. In this paper, we demonstrate a portable multi-pitch electronic drum (e-drum) system based on large-area (> 15cm in diameter) ring-shaped pressure sensors made with low-cost screen-printing process. This e-drum system, which can accurately generate six different pitches of sounds in the current prototype, has the following key advantages: 1) a light-weight, exible, bendable, and robust humaninstrument interface, 2) real-time sound responses, 3) comparable acoustic sound quality with the conventional drums, and 4) easily expandable to a much larger number of sound-pitches. The digital music synthesis is implemented using a TI-DSP board and can be easily re-congured to realize other percussion instruments such as pianos and xylophones. To the best of our knowledge, this is the rst successful demonstration of a portable e-drum based on largearea ring-shaped exible sensors, whose success could open up many new applications.

Figure 1. (a) Large-area ring-shaped exible pressure sensors (16-cm in diameter) and (b) Pressure sensor under the bending conditions.

1. Introduction
Conventional percussion music instruments such as drums, xylophones, and pianos are bulky and not easily portable. Digital percussion instruments with the aid of digital music processing can reproduce comparable acoustic sounds with the conventional percussion instruments but do not require the bulky resonant cavities for sound amplication [1]. Pressure sensors will be an ideal candidate as a human-instrument interface because of following reasons: 1) it can mimic the way of music playing by sensing the human touch

and converting it into electronic signals to generate the acoustic sounds but requires much less space, and 2) it can be fabricated on exible substrates using low-cost printing methods (e.g. screen printing) that enables low-cost and portable digital percussion instrument [2]. Existing commercial pressure sensors, however, are not optimized for acoustic uses and suffer from non-linearity and hysteresis problems. To meet the timing, accuracy, and reliability requirements of human-instrument interface of the percussion music instruments, therefore, a exible pressure sensor with high linearity and robustness is highly desirable. For the e-drum application, hitting different locations of the drum surface should generate different sound pitches. The sound pitch depends on the distance between the hitting location and the center of the drum surface. To mimic the way that a conventional drum is played, we need to integrate several pressure sensors together, each of which generates a unique sound pitch. The pressure sensors manufactured using low-cost printing methods, unfortunately, suffer from non-uniformity and cross-interference problems when they are integrated together. In this paper, we describe a digital music instrument called e-Drum in which we developed and integrated

Figure 2. The working principle of the proposed pressure sensor. is the volume resistivity.

three different ring-shaped pressure sensors onto the same plastic substrate. With two sets of the ring-shaped pressure sensors, the drum player can play this edrum with his/her both hands and generate six different pitches when hitting on different areas of the drum surface. Since these large-area ring-shaped sensors are manufactured using the screen-printing process, the cost of this sensor can be very low and the sensor can be made in any shapes to meet the needs for various applications. To generate sounds in real-time [3] comparable to a conventional drums, we utilize a TexasInstrument (TI) 6-channel analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to convert the analog sensing signals to digital bitstreams and a Digital-signal-processing (DSP) board [4] for digital music synthesis and processing. The number of the sound-pitches is easily expandable by simply allocating an ADC with more input channels. To ensure a real-time hitting-to-sound response, the embedded software (e.g. task scheduling) must be carefully designed to utilize the hardware resources efciently. The organization of this paper is followed. Section 2 summarizes the large-area pressure sensor we developed for this application. We describe the sensors working principle, the sensor structure, and its performance. Section 3 elaborates the system architecture and software scheduling to meet both the timing and accuracy requirements. Section 4 shows the system performance and Section 5 concludes the work and describes some future opportunities.

Figure 3. The screen printing method for sensor fabrication. (a) The printing process, and (b) the shadow mask for pattern denitions. of different pitches. The pressure sensor is essentially a pressure-sensing, two-terminal resistor whose resistance value is dependent on the force applied onto the sensor surface. The working principle of the pressure sensor is illustrated in Figure 2 and Equations 1 2. L R= (1) L (2) A where is the volume resistivity, L is the sensor thickness, A is the sensor area, and R is the measurable resistance between two sensor terminals. Equation 1 is applied only in the middle section of Figure 2. Inside the pressure sensor, there are a number of small conductive particles called Carbon Black. When no force is applied onto the sensor, the sensor thickness is high and the density of the Carbon Black is relatively low. This makes the resistivity between the two sensor terminals high ( 1015 ohm cm). When a force is applied onto the sensor, the total area A is conned to remain the same while the sensor thickness L is reduced. This will increase the density of the Carbon Black and therefore reduce the resistivity between the two sensor terminals as illustrated in Figure 2. The resistivity value starts to reach its saturation value ( 102 ohm cm) when the applied force becomes excessive.

2. Flexible Pressure Sensors

2.1. Design Principles
Two sets of large-area exible pressure sensors are shown in Figure 1. To mimic the acoustic features of the conventional drums, each Drum Pad consists of three different ring-shaped sensors of different radii as shown in Figure 1(a). Hitting different locations of the Drum Pads surface could generate acoustic sounds

2.2. Sensor Manufacturing: Screen Printing

Figure 3 shows the low-cost screen printing process that is used to make the pressure sensor shown in Figure 1. By using a low-cost shadow mask shown in Figure 3(b), the desirable shape can be dened and the functional material (i.e. the piezoresistive material) can be deposited in between the two electrodes as shown in Figure 3(a). The piezoresistive material shown in Figure 4 is made of Carbon Black and Polymer. By utilizing this screen printing process, the cost of the

Figure 4. The piezoresistive material made of Carbon Black and Polymer.

Figure 7. The e-drum prototype. This system includes: 1) exible sensors, 2) a conversion circuit, and 3) a DSP subsystem. A 6-channel ADC in the DSP subsystem is used for converting sampled analog signals to digital bitstreams.

Figure 5. Measured conductivity versus the applied pressure (psi) of the proposed sensor.

proposed sensor can be very low, and virtually any shape can be made to meet the needs of various applications.

2.3. Sensor Performance Evaluation

To further study the sensor performance under various operational conditions, we conducted tests on linearity, reliability, and bending to evaluate its applicability for acoustic uses. 2.3.1. Tests on Proposed Sensor. Figure 5 shows the measured conductivity of the sensor versus the applied pressure in units of pounds-per-square-inch

(psi). Using the imaginary straight line connecting the two end points as the reference, the linearity of the sensor is within 2% of the ideal linearity which is more than sufcient for acoustic uses. The reliability test shows that the deviation of the conductivity-vspressure curve from the original curve is under 5% even after continuous pressing 10 million times. The small deviation demonstrates its robustness for practical uses. To evaluate its uniformity, we measured and compared the conductivity at different locations in the same sensor. The uniformity test results are shown in Figure 6. These results indicate that the conductivity-vs-pressure curves at difference locations are all very close to each other and validate that the proposed sensor can serve as a robust human interface for percussion instruments.

3. e-Drum System: From Touch to Sound

The e-drum system is composed of three main components: 1) ring-shaped exible pressure sensors as shown in Figure 1, 2) a signal conversion circuit, and 3) a digital signal processing (DSP) subsystem. Figure 7 shows our initial working prototype that can achieve multi-pitch real-time sound responses. The descriptions and key design issues of the system components are summarized in the following subsections.

3.1. Human-Instrument Interface

The pitch and amplitude of acoustic sounds generated in a conventional drum depend on the hitting spots and proles, such as the strength and period. To reproduce the experience of playing the conventional drum on our e-drum, we designed the human-instrument interface the exible sensor as a ring-shape element. In addition to the obvious benet of mimicking the surface shape of a conventional drum, there is

Figure 6. The conductivity-vs-pressure plot measured at three different locations of the same sensor.

Figure 8. Process deducing ring-shaped sensor arrangement. 1) Rethink the true application demand. 2) Connect sensors with the same function. 3) Ring-shaped sensor.

Figure 10. Task scheduling table. Yellow blocks show the tasks required intense CPU resource. Red arrows show which operation in the main program leads to the independent tasks for McBSP.

Figure 9. Illustration of system hardware modules. McBSP is multiple-channel buffering serial port and EDMA is extensive direct memory access.

Figure 11. Comparison of computation time w/o and w/ McBSP and EDMA.

another key advantage of using a ring-shaped sensor: it does not require any driver circuitry and therefore can reduce the power consumption signicantly. It should also be noted that the ring-shaped sensor can achieve the same level of sensing resolution as a pressure sensor matrix [5], [6]. The sensors are fabricated by a screen-printing process which can maintain a very low fabrication cost for making such ring-shaped, largesize pressure sensors.

multiple channels must be carefully multiplexed to avoid any data loss. In addition, to realize real-time sound responses and to ensure the sound quality of synthesized music, the DSP must receive at least 20 consecutive data samples from each channel in realtime. The task scheduling to achieve real-time sound responses will be summarized in the following. 3.3.2. Task Scheduling. The McBSP (Multiplechannel Buffering Serial Port) [7] and EDMA (Extensive Direct Memory Access) units [8], communicate with low-speed peripheral devices, the ADC and the DAC, and buffer the data transfer. Effectively utilizing McBSP and EDMA can signicantly reduce the CPU computation load and interrupt. Figure 11 shows how the tasks are scheduled to minimize the signal processing time of Figure 11. In principle, the CPU requests the data from the next channel, e.g. channel #3, before it processes data of current channel, e.g. channel #2. It makes two time-consuming tasks running in parallel in the scheduling in Figure 10. (One is the yellow task block of CPU; the other one is yellow task block of McBSP-ADC) It also reduce the computation time from Tmadc+Tsp to Max(Tmadc,Tsp) in Figure 11. On the other hand, The McBSP and EDMA of DAC independently handle the date transfer to DAC in Figure 10. It makes main program not need to wait for the transfer nish to reduce the computation time from N*(Tmadc+Tsp+Tmdac) to N*Max(Tmadc,Tsp)+Tmdac in Figure 11.

3.2. Signal Conversion Circuit

As described in Equation 2, the measurable resistance R between two terminals of the sensor depends on the force applied onto the sensor. To implement a digital music instrument, whose sound quality heavily relies the system linearity, we designed an inverting amplier to convert the measured resistance R of each channel to the voltage of an analog signal.

3.3. DSP Subsystem

3.3.1. Hardware Conguration. The DSP subsystem consists of three different boards including: 1) a DSP board, 2) a DSP-ADC interface board, and 3) a 6channel 14-bit ADC. The ADC samples the analog signals from the conversion circuit, converts them into the digital bitstreams for sound synthesis in the DSP board. As there are multiple input channels in parallel (in our initial prototype, there are 6 channels) and only one DSP, the incoming digital bitstreams from

Table 1. Errors before and after Compensation

Test Test Test Test Test #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 w/o compensation -24.53% -35.85% -32.08% -22.64% -28.30% w/ compensation -5.96% 9.93% 4.63% -8.61% 0.66%

Figure 13. Illustration of the touch continuity and cross interference problems. a) A pressure sensor consisting of Region I, II and III. b) Proles of three sensor regions when Region I is pressed. Table 2. e-Drum System Performance
Maximal Response Time Maximal Distinguishable Frequency 21.8 ms 37-Hz

Figure 12. (a) Touching at the boundaries between sensor areas (shown in red circles). b) Five different cases of boundary touching used for testing. The comparison in Figure 11 demonstrates that well-scheduled tasks signicantly reduce the computation time. With this scheduling strategy, further expanding the systems channels wont cost much computation penalty. The penalty is reduced from Tmadc+Tsp+Tmdac to Max(Tmadc,Tsp) with the aid of the McBSP.

4.2. Cross Interference

In order to reduce the cost of the e-drum, multiple sensors are fabricated on the common substrate to simplify the fabrication process. However, common substrate causes the cross-interference effect. The edrum system must apply the cross-comparison method to eliminate the problem. Ideally, sensor structure on which no pressure applies is like open circuit, so the resistor is larger than 10M ohms. But, in Figure, touching happens on the region I but not on the region II and region III. The status of non-touching areas, region II and region III, could be viewed as the smallpressure touching, when large force is applied on the region I. The e-drum system must compare the pressure of three regions, before the system make a touching decision.

4. System Solutions for Sensor NonIdeality

4.1. Touch Continuity
When the touching/hitting happens on the boundary such as the red circle in Figure 12, the pressure is divided into three areas: the pressure sensor #1, the pressure sensor #2 and the boundary. In order to catch the accurate pressure, the system must sum the amount of the pressure applied on two sensors and compensate for the pressure absorbed by the boundary. The nal pressure equation is P = (P 1 + P 2) (1 + C ) (3)

5. System Performance
The e-Drum system is engineered to be real-time [3] in order to mimic the conventional percussion music instrument. The system performance evaluation, summarized in Table 2, is to apply the square wave input and to observe the drum sound waveform output in Figure 14 (a). The response time is measured from the low-to-high edge of the square wave to the start of drum sound waveform in Figure 14 (b). The maximal response time 21.8ms is so small that the players cannot sense the delay. The computation tasks during the response time are discussed in Figure 10 and Figure 11. Additionally, the distinguishable frequency is the input pulse frequency in which e-Drum can

where P1 is the pressure applied on the sensor #1, P2 is the pressure applied on the sensor #2, and C is the compensate ratio. C is 0.404 on this e-Drum sensor. In the touching continuity test of Figure 12, the 20 psi pressure is applied on four locations. When system applies the compensation method, the error drops down to be less than 10% in Table 1.

responses is also illustrated. The details of embedded software design including task scheduling and the solutions to overcome the sensor non-idealities are also elaborated. The system response shows that it only requires 20 ms to convert the human touches to acoustic sounds and it can handle up to 37-Hz drumhitting frequency, which is more than sufcient for most cases. Our future works include system integration for commercial products and channeling-expanding for other percussion instrument such as piano and xylophone.

References
[1] E. R. Miranda and M. Wanderley, New Digital Musical Instruments: Control And Interaction Beyond the Keyboard, 1st ed. A-R Editions, Inc., Jul. 2006. [2] F. Vecchi, C. Freschi, S. Micera, A. M. Sabatini, P. Dario, R. Sacchetti, S. S. di SantAnna, and C. I. RTR, Experimental evaluation of two commercial force sensors for applications in biomechanics and motor control, in 5th Ann. Conf. of Int. FES, 2000. [3] C. Krishna and Y. Lee, Guest Editors Introduction: Real-Time Systems, Computer, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 10 11, 1991.

Figure 14. a) Input square pulses and corresponding output drum sound waveforms. (scale: 200 ms/div). b) Illustration of the response time. (scale: 20 ms/div) c) a 37 Hz input square pulse and the drum sound waveform. (scale: 20 ms/div) d) a 48 Hz input square pulse and the drum sound waveform. (20 ms/div)

[4] Texas Instruments, TMS320C6416T DSK technical reference. [Online]. Available: http: \\c6000. spectrumdigital. com\ dsk6416\ V3\ docs\ dsk6416 TechRef.pdf [5] T. Someya, T. Sekitani, S. Iba, Y. Kato, H. Kawaguchi, and T. Sakurai, A large-area, exible pressure sensor matrix with organic eld-effect transistors for articial skin applications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 101, no. 27, pp. 99669970, Jul. 2004. [6] H. Kawaguchi, T. Someya, T. Sekitani, and T. Sakurai, Cut-and-paste customization of organic FET integrated circuit and its application to electronic articial skin, Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 177185, 2005. [7] Texas Instruments, TMS320C6000 DSP multichannel buffered serial port (McBSP) reference guide. [Online]. Available: http: \\focus.ti.com.cn\ cn\lit\ug\spru580g\ spru580g.pdf [8] , TMS320C6000 DSP enhanced direct memory access (EDMA) controller reference guide. [Online]. Available: http: \\focus.ti.com\ lit\ug\spru234c\spru234c.pdf [9] T. Holmes, Electronic and experimental music: technology, music, and culture. Routledge, 2008.

detect every single pulse and play at least the attack stage of the drum sound (ADSR Model) [9], such as the Figure 14 (c). The maximal distinguishable frequency 37 Hz is capable to support up to 2220 beats per minutes, which surpass the resolution requirement of percussion instruments.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, we demonstrated a portable digital percussion instrument called e-Drum. We also introduced our novel ring-shaped exible pressure sensor including various test results to validate its linearity and robustness for acoustic uses. A DSP subsystem that is used to sample, convert, and synthesize the human-touches to generate multi-pitch real-time sound