Post-mortem: DIY practice pad trigger

[kupooglop]

I noticed every now and then a member posts a question about the best type of trigger. I decided to post the results of my DIY practice pad based kick drum. After about a year of severe double pedal punishment, I noticed crummy performance from my kick drum. It started with increasing x-talk and false triggers. I could tune these things out in md initially, but it got worse over time. The performance degraded into machine-gun drum triggers, multiple notes, and finally midi log jams that resulted in system crashes in the various instruments in my midi network. At this point, I started taking stuff apart. Lo and behold, this is what I found.

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From the outside it looks like it would work pretty good. On the inside, it was a different story.

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Plastic sheet tore & foamy junk is disintegrating.

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Once foamy junk was gone, the beaters started torquing the metal plate the piezo was glued onto.

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Flipping the plate over reveals the failure. Once the plate started rotating, the wires began to break. In conclusion, I will no longer use practice pads for triggers. This is why:
1. They are great when you only need ONE! Once you have two or more, x-talk becomes intractable.
2. They are WAAAAAYYYY TOOOOO HOOOTTTT!!!!! After months of fighting with voltage dividers, half wave rectifiers, full wave rectifiers, voltage regulators, high pass filters, I finally got a combination that gave useful results. I became annoyed when I built an A to E trigger and got useful results in a couple of days.
3. They are not very durable and they have a short lifespan. The pictures speak for themselves.
In the future all toms, snares, kick drums I build will be A to E. After messing with practice pads, A to E drums turn out to give far superior results with a lot less effort. Now to figure out how to keep the leads from vibrating off my DIY cymbals.