Each vacation season, a number of of YouTube’s most distinguished makers get collectively for a Secret Santa reward change. It’s all the time enjoyable to see what sort of tailor-made presents they create and this 12 months isn’t any completely different. Sam Battle of the LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER YouTube channel drew Ali Spagnola in the latest change. Ali likes each music and train, so Battle constructed her this quirky drum machine managed by the consumer’s heartbeat.

At first look, this seems to be like a reasonably typical drum sequencer. It cycles via eight beats and may play from 5 completely different samples. Every beat has a set of 5 switches to pick the pattern to play on that beat. However the twist is that the machine solely strikes to the following beat when the consumer’s heartbeats, versus transferring via the sequence at a constant charge.

That sounds a bit of bit jarring, as a result of hearts usually are not metronomes. However the profit is that the tempo will increase with the consumer’s coronary heart charge, so the tempo matches their exercise degree.

An Arduino Nano board detects the consumer’s pulse via a Pimoroni Pulse Sensor. It performs drum samples (or any audio clips) loaded onto a SparkFun WAV Set off module. Battle wired the sequencer switches in a keyboard-style matrix, which reduces the variety of IO pins required to simply the variety of rows plus columns as an alternative of 1 pin for each change. On every beat, the Arduino checks the switches after which performs the corresponding drum samples. Lastly, Battle crammed all of that {hardware} into an enclosure with 3D-printed ornament that makes the system seem like an outsized coronary heart.

This isn’t one thing you’d ever see on a retailer shelf, which is what makes it the right reward for one maker to ship one other.