Tristan Calderbank shared this live performance with his DIY robotic percussionist.
The system is based on the open hardware Arduino platform. The drum patterns were created in Ableton Live and output as MIDI. The Arduino runs custom code (available for download) and converts the MIDI into servo PWM signals:
Here’s an example of the robotic drum machine in action:
Calderbank has shared technical details at his site.
They don’t smoke or booze, but they must be pretty boring to hang out with.