Ok I’ve become fairly obsessed with the idea of having hyperactive, ratcheted, midi glitched drums playing on an acoustic drumkit at a future show of mine. I’m aware of this product, but it’s very expensive and also out of stock. http://polyend.com/perc-pro-drumming-machine/#reviews
Anyone know of alternatives?
Cheers for any help. 
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A solenoid with a MOSFET driver circuit (or equivalent) – you might not need the MOSFET driver if the midi interface has enough power.
Google solenoid drum
You can do this for not a lot of money.
BTW: you can buy a pre-built MOSFET driver circuit for not very much.
ADDED:
Robot Ringo
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@Jukka Thanks man. Solenoids! That’s the word I was looking for. I assume it’s roughly the same tech as is in the perc pro? I guess perc pro is more user friendly!
Something like one of these with a teensy board, with a midi interface plugged into my octatrack? I’m looking for a 3/4 voice(solenoid) setup. Think I’d need some high grade components as apparently regular solenoids aren’t designed for heavy, continual and rapid use! Can you offer any more advice? I have a teensy microcontroller, a few arduinos etc which I played around with making a midi USB host and some other stuff on the cheap last year, but I feel this project could be a hair-puller!
P.s. would a midi-cv gate converter do the job?
The Polyend Perc Pro products almost certainly are solenoids and whatever else they put around them. They’re designed with their action set to directly hit the percussive surface, with probably some cushion so the head overshoots slightly hits the drum and retracts.
Having this all together means there’s a smaller delay between the midi signal to the noise from the percusive strike. That’s not necessarily a problem, you can move the midi signal forward for any mechanism that is delayed. So this might be necessary for a mechanism like in the video i posted above where the solenoid drives a drum stick, that has a spring that lets the drum stick overshoot and snap back a little after the strike. There’s a tiny delay here that one might need to account for, particularly if you have strikers with different delay times.
Polyend makes nice products the Seq is cool, the Poly super useful, and the forthcoming Medusa that Polyend is doing together with Dreadbox is likely to be amazing. But they can be a little on the premium side.
If you’re designing this yourself you’ll need to pay attention to the spec sheets for your components. So things like the distance the solenoid travels, the voltage and amperage it draws, and to a lesser extent the force it can generate. Duty cycle also can come into it as you mention. Then you need to pay attention to the eletrical driver to be sure it also is capable of this.
You might look around some online, i’m pretty sure there are quite a few people that have alreay done this part of the design and have very nicely laid out a ‘recipe’ that will make this all easier.
I think having the electronics and mechanical guts open and exposed will add to the “hyperactive, ratcheted, glitched” nature of this all for your audience.
Of course another option would be to drive this whole thing with metal marbles. 
Wintergatan has been doing a whole series of videos of his redesign and manufacture of the “marble machine” which would be good viewing in case you ever feel overcome working on your solenoid project.
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Great tips thanks very much for your help mate!
Out of the box Midi Drum Machine
I knew about this, and yesterday i found it again. I like this better than the Polyend product and it’s less expensive too. You can use there solenoid strikers, or do it yourself with their electronics, the Automat.
Twelve ouputs – that’s great. I may just get one of these it looks fun.
ADDED: The website gives some insight too – you don’t have to limit the output to solenoids, you can drive motors, buzzers, lights, small toys, …
This might add some fun to the output of your Digitakt or Octatrack – i’m thinking now of an acoustic layer for my Analog Keys.
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Several years later…
What do you think about midi controlled drumkits at the moment?
What is your experience with it?
Dadamachines vs. a (cheaper) DIY-version vs. Polyend Perc?
I’ve never used Dadamachines Automat Toolkit, but I agree with younger @Jukka that it looks fascinating. Note, it looks like this product did not originally feature a velocity sensitivity implementation, yet later worked it in with a firmware update. Looking at Dadamachines web store now; that product is sadly currently on hibernation.
Same with Polyend Perc, it’s unfortunately discontinued/on hibernation. I have an original one with 3 perc balls and I find that it works very nicely. It’s shockingly powerful and fast.
I have Bastl Solenoid with CV Expander and love that as well, but alas, that one is now discontinued too. This a bit more involved to get going since you need to have a powered skiff and then a separate power supply just for the Solenoid module itself… then you need to source solenoids which work well and modify them to operate as silently as possible, find a mounting solution, maybe attach a beater. No MIDI out of the box.
I believe Bastl Solenoid and expander are open source, so you can find the schematic and BOM online or reach out to Bastl for that if you want some reference for DIY.
I am not sure what the options are outside of DIY anymore, but it’s worthwhile to pursue purchasing any of these used, if the price is fair.
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Thanks.
Didn‘t knew the Bastl Solenoids.
Regarding Dadamachines & hibernation: if I understand it correctly, the toolkits are still available, but via Schneidersladen in Berlin:
Regarding DIY… Tristan Calderbank built a system with Hitec HS-311 servos and an Arduino Uno.
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The DIY option is pretty easy. I built a 4 channel solenoid percussion machine last year with just a handful of transistors and diodes. Takes 5V pulse input for each channel and uses a 12V 3A power supply to drive the solenoids. Works super well with something like TR-06 sending the pulses.
Mine has internet connectivity now, and connects to a browser based sequencer. One of these days I’ll make it public and set up a stream so anyone can come in and program it.
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…get the fastest drum to midi trigger signal processor to find…
the very first nord drum 1 is such a thing and can be found easily around 200 bux 2nd hand…
add four meshhead drums to that…around 80 bux each at thomann…or make it just two by picking those which adress rim and mesh skin separately…
create a nice collection of glitched out percussive sounds to ur ot, add the mesh skin drums to the nord drum 1 and ur accoustic drum kit, connect the nd1 midi out to the ot, or any other sampler and u got 4 individual super responsive midi channels to adress with whatever ur up to…realtime ready for all kinds of rolls, paradibblies, potatoe breaks and single hits…
no latency involved, full on drumming…
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We’re talking about using MIDI/trigger signals to strike drums, not striking drums to trigger midi 
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…o…i see…well, i never tried the other way around…
really hoping polyend revive their perc project somehow, looks like dadamachine’s is also experiencing slowdown on their product too, is gear like this just too niche to take off?
If you don’t mind getting dirty….
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