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HaQue
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« on: January 15, 2009, 11:58:42 AM »
Hi All,

I have started a project to connect real electronic Drums up to the Wiimote to simulate the drum controllers of guitar hero World Tour(GHWT) and Rock Band(RB).

BACKGROUND:

The drum controllers are completely sold out here in Adelaide South Australia, and I'm guessing the whole of AU.  I decided to buy some real electronic drums with the confidence that I can adapt them to act as a controller and have the added bonus of learning real drums.  I bought a Legacy DD506 kit, settling on that because it has MIDI IN and MIDI out and also a USB port.  I am unsure how the USB will function because the manual states it will be detected on the PC as a USB audio device.  I was hoping it would help in any hacking, but that remains to be seen.

The kit was $1,000, and while a budget kit, it is all I can justify spending at this stage, so the nice Rolands and yamaha's are out for now.  It has different sounding user and preprogrammed drum kits, practice songs where you can turn the drums on or off, a metronome include a counting voice, and quite a few other features.  The drums consist of a Snare and 3 Tom drums, a Kick drum and symbols HiHat, Crash and ride.  more than enough for the GHWT or RB!

Due to the excellent work already done regarding the i2c communication between peripherals and the wiimote, I am confident I can build an adapter to play my drums to control GHWT and RB.

I have gathered as much info as I could, and while I am waiting for my Arduino to arrive, am trying to process it all.

I am sure I read somewhere it is possible to plug MIDI drums into the drum controller, but I don't have one, and I would rather get the most out of my new drums anyway!

I have also started a new blog where I will add everything to do with the project:  http://haquesprojects.wordpress.com/

If anyone has any info on what the Wii Drum Controller bundled with GHWT outputs over i2c to the wiimote, I would love to see it.

Till the next update...

HaQue
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HaQue
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« Reply #1 on: January 15, 2009, 09:54:44 PM »
After a quick 2 hours sleep, I was browsing thru the 20 or so open firefox tabs to try and gather any tid bits that may help with my project.

I am excited by the article by brian Peek at http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2007/03/14/1879033.aspx.  Now, after a very quick skim it looks like comms to the wiimote is possible using bluetooth HID and device management API's!  I quote:
Quote
In this article, Brian Peek demonstrates how to connect to and use the Nintendo Wiimote from C# and VB.NET. The final output is an easy-to-use managed API for the Wiimote that can be used in any managed application.

It is quite possible that an Arduino might not even be needed to complete my project, though it will be cool anyway to work with it.  I will now go and check out the code a bit and try some tests with the wiimote... I am stoked I can actually start working without the Arduino Smiley

one thing that is great with PC work is you can write programs to brute force things you aren't quite sure of and try many different things while you sleep.  The only thing that keeps you up while doing this is if you need to reset the remote by pushing buttons.  Well why not build a serial or USB servo/solenoid to do it for you?  If your program loses connection with the wiimote, simply send a reset command!  the possibilities are endless.

HaQue

EDIT:
I think I should have thought about that for at least a second... If the wiimote is paired with the PC, then it isn't paired with the Wii, and hence I won't be able to play guitar Hero World Tour with that setup.. Doh!

Still, I can have a play around with it and see what it can do.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2009, 10:20:34 PM by HaQue » Logged
HaQue
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« Reply #2 on: January 20, 2009, 01:37:53 AM »
Hi all,
Im asking for a little help with any of the following:

1. Has anyone done any work with guitar hero world tour instruments in relation to the data sent back & worth between the Wiimote and the instrument?

2. Anyone have a broken or cheap GHWT drum set they would like to sell, or anyone in Adelaide That would consider loaning me a set for a week? Bought some today!

3.  If you are interested in the project, or you would think you might use the info gained to setup your own drums once we have worked it out could you leave a little feedback on haquesprojects.wordpress.org?

cheers

HaQue
« Last Edit: January 22, 2009, 09:26:59 AM by HaQue » Logged
HaQue
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« Reply #3 on: January 23, 2009, 10:35:59 PM »
hmm why would the circuit have a Sharp PC900V Digital Output Type OPIC Photocoupler?
cant ID the other ICs yet...
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HaQue
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« Reply #4 on: January 27, 2009, 09:51:47 AM »
New photos up at http://haquesprojects.wordpress.com/ showing the internals of the Wii Drums I bought.  The circuits look are pretty simple, but I am having trouble ID'ing some of the IC's.  Im  a bit new on the serial interfacing scene so pardon the random info Im throwing out, it is more a collection of my findings than an informative post...

The Drum Brain:
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The Drum Brain board is labeled " Wii Drums Brain V1R00" and has a single 48 pin IC labeled F0511 which could be a μPD78F0511  which is a 78K0/KC2 8-Bit Single-Chip Microcontroller from NEC. A possible datasheet is here: http://haquesprojects.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/pd78f0511.pdf.

The board has a connector to join to the Synth board with pins labelled: CLK, MISO, 0v, MOSI, +3v3, CS.
CLK = SPI clock
MOSI = Master In Slave Out
MISO = Master Out Slave In
CS = Chip Select

Quote
MOSI, MISO and SCK are standard pins for SPI communication. MOSI and MISO are also known as SDO and SDI, respectively.

more info at places like http://www.piclist.com/tecHREF/io/serial/spis.htm

and from http://practicalembeddedjava.com/SPI/spi.html SPI Basics

Quote
SPI is a duplex, bitwise serial protocol which was developed by Motorola many years ago. It is widely used to link controllers with slave devices such as analog to digital converters.

There is also a 7 pin unpopulated connector spot.

On the Drum Synth board labeled "Drum Synth V2R00" there are 2  HA1504 14 pin chips manufactured by Microchip, and another 28 pin chip with the label HA15?0 also manufactured by Microchip. I think the ? = 0 but it is hard to read.  I cant find any info at this stage on them but I have had limited time due to starting a new job.

more coming soon....
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evilpaul
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« Reply #5 on: February 17, 2009, 04:09:07 AM »
Quote from: HaQue on January 23, 2009, 10:35:59 PM
hmm why would the circuit have a Sharp PC900V Digital Output Type OPIC Photocoupler?
cant ID the other ICs yet...

An optocoupler is part of the MIDI spec for MIDI-IN ports.

http://www.midi.org/techspecs/electrispec.php
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evilpaul
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« Reply #6 on: February 17, 2009, 05:15:16 AM »
Quote from: HaQue on January 20, 2009, 01:37:53 AM
Hi all,
Im asking for a little help with any of the following:

1. Has anyone done any work with guitar hero world tour instruments in relation to the data sent back & worth between the Wiimote and the instrument?

I haven't looked at it myself, you could use an i2c sniffer though. A quick search reveals that you can do it with a PC parallel port, or you could build one with an ATTiny2313 microcontroller.

I have captured the MIDI data that gets sent to the GHWT drums by the drum tuning app over the USB-MIDI cable. If you think it might be helpful I can post it up.
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PinkRose1234
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« Reply #7 on: October 08, 2009, 04:30:17 AM »
Actually, I am only here just to congratulate you because you have already started a project to connect real electronic drums up to the Wiimote to simulate the drum controllers of guitar hero World Tour and Rock Band. In my own research, an electronic drum is a percussion instrument in which the sound is generated by an electronic waveform generator or sampler instead of by acoustic vibration. How can that electronic drum controls the hero World Tour and Rock Band? But I think there are already games in the market with the same kind of idea.

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« Last Edit: December 15, 2009, 07:42:47 AM by PinkRose1234 » Logged
thijsnl
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« Reply #8 on: November 01, 2009, 04:17:06 PM »
I did some investigation on the hardware and found some usefull stuff!

I put it all on my site, http://members.home.nl/mathijs/

Regards,

Mathijs
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salina
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« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2010, 01:34:04 AM »
Great go ahead
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