High Level - strange phenomena SOLVED

[airflamesred]

The video is very blurred and it's hard to see values.

Yes it is blurry, seems to have lost some clarity in translation.

airflamesred, you live not too far from me. What about choosing one weekend day to come to my place with your problem pad and your MegaDrum and we will try to solve this problem together?

That makes sense, Ill let you know.

[Nepo]

Hello all,
I have 5 DiY (10"-14") cymbals and 6 DIY (8"- 16") meshpads and in my experience I can say that the gap between Autohighlevel and adjusted Highlevel is total different.
I use Autohighlevel as roughly trent to find the correct Highlevel.
I think it depense on the Harwaredesign, Piezotype, Meshtension ect....
I have'nt mesure my pads with an oszilloscope, but I'm pretty sure that the peaks are not really constant by the same hit.

br
Nepo

[airflamesred]

With help, and indeed great hospitality, from Dmitri this matter has been solved. Essentially it was to do with pad construction and my swapping to larger piezos.

[ignotus]

Hi,

Could either of you elaborate a bit more on what precisely was the problem? I've just purchased an ARM-based board and while trying to configure my kit I've run into the exact same issue: at a highlevel of, say, 800, the velocity maxes out at exactly 91; impossible to get it any higher, and if I lower it to, say, 700, I can get velocities of 127, but it reaches that value too easily, meaning that the triggering is all over the place. I like to think I'm pretty well-acquainted with the settings, but this has me completely baffled. This never happened with my ancient MD board, it took me about 2 minutes to get a pad set up and triggering like a charm; it's as if the highlevel parameter is creating a brick wall, compressing higher velocities down to a specific value.

Does the piezo need to be able to flex more/less? I have trimpots on all my inputs so am able to tame the signals but I can't seem to find the point were this problem goes away and light hits get picked up reliably too.

I was quick to dismiss this as a non-issue in this thread, but now I'm experiencing it I realise I wasn't properly understanding what was going on, so apologies for that...

[ignotus]

Never mind, spent some more time with this and seem to have it sorted. Some careful adjustment of the trimpot and a few parameters in the module seem to have me on track without noticing any of the issues described above. These new boards require a different approach to configuration in comparison to the old designs and I was thrown a bit off track there for a while.

[airflamesred]

Dmitri would have to clarify but as I recall it was just to do with the piezo maxing out. I think I got around it by physically dampening the offending piezos.

Does this ARM version seem faster?

[ignotus]

To be honest I can't notice a difference in terms of speed/latency, and I'm coming from an old hand-made atmega644 board. That doesn't mean to say it isn't actually faster, because it is, but as far as perception goes, I don't think I'd tell them apart in a blind test. As is the case with a lot of things, the placebo effect can go a long way. This isn't to belittle it in any way, just that if you're thinking of upgrading to get more speed, I think it's the wrong reason. What did it for me is the potential for future improvements, stability (my old md had many quirks) and the cool new interface.