Walabot Drum Machine

An 8-pad radar drum machine powered by the Walabot sensor. Wave your hands in front of the sensor to hit drums — no contact required.

Pad layout

         LEFT  ←————————————————→  RIGHT
FAR    [Crash] [  Tom ] [ Ride ] [Open HH]
NEAR   [Hi-Hat] [ Kick ] [Snare] [  Clap ]
              ↑ sensor faces you ↑

The sensor splits the space in front of it into a 4 azimuth × 2 depth grid. Dead zone gaps between each pad prevent adjacent zones from bleeding into each other.

Requirements

Hardware

• Walabot Makers Series USB sensor

Walabot SDK

The SDK is only available for Linux x86_64 and Linux ARMhf. Download and install the .deb from walabot.com:

sudo dpkg -i walabot_maker_<version>_linux_x64.deb
pip install WalabotAPI

macOS / Windows: the SDK does not run natively. You need a Linux VM with USB passthrough (e.g. UTM on macOS). Audio and the GUI code itself are cross-platform.

Python

Python 3.8+ with tkinter:

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt-get install python3-tk

No other Python packages are required.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/peterkoczan/walabot-drum-machine.git
cd walabot-drum-machine

# Generate drum sounds (pure Python standard library — no external tools needed)
python3 generate_sounds.py

Running

python3 walabeat2_gui.py

If the sensor is not found, add your user to the plugdev group and reload udev rules — or run with sudo once to verify hardware access.

Controls

Control	Action
Wave hand in a sector	Hit that drum
Wave rapidly near-right	Snare roll
Threshold slider	Tune sensitivity live (lower = triggers on lighter touches)
RESET button	Zero all hit counters

Audio

Playback uses the platform's built-in audio command — no extra packages needed:

Platform	Command used
Linux	aplay (ALSA, pre-installed)
macOS	afplay (pre-installed)
Windows	winsound (Python standard library)

Tweaking

At the top of walabeat2_gui.py:

Constant	Default	Effect
ENERGY_THRESHOLD	300	Starting threshold (also adjustable via slider)
BAR_MAX	1500	Energy level that pegs the glow at full brightness
DEAD_R_PX	20	Visual gap at the near/far radial boundary
DEAD_PHI_DEG	4	Visual angular gap between phi sectors
FLASH_MS	140	How long a pad stays lit after a hit
R_MIN / R_MAX	15 / 60 cm	Detection depth range

License

MIT — free to use, modify, and share.