The Marimbatron is a fully featured digital marimba made during Fabacademy 2024. It is a MIDI-based USB musical instrument that you play with drumsticks and/or mallets. It supports an isomorphic key layout which maintains consistent musical intervals between keys, allowing for the same shapes to be used for chords and scales regardless of the root note. It also supports the traditional piano key layout.
The Marimbatron is designed to be modular. Every octave is a fully self-contained module with 19 pressure-sensitive pads and a SAMD21J18 48Mhz ARM® Cortex®-M0+ microcontroller. All octave modules are connected using I2C to a SAMD21E18 48Mhz ARM® Cortex®-M0+ main microcontroller. The Marimbatron consists of 76 Fablab-made pressure sensors with high-speed readout (200 us to read 19 sensors, 12-bit ADC). This allows it to output MIDI data in less than 10ms.
Final Project Fab Academy 2024
