Plugs and jacks were donated (along with a nice function generator and oscilloscope) from my high school electronics teacher. The knobs and switches (not included yet) were salvaged from a few on-boxes my father had laying around. The panel was salvaged from a broken bench and the sides were found in Russell Industrial Center.
You can listen to a pretty recent recording of it involving a drum machine playing along with it and sending triggers to it here.
I was just looking over some of my notes I made during the development of this synthesizer. I think it’s really come a long way considering this:
This is my first synthesizer project.
This is my first Arduino project.
I’ve never been able to touch a modular synthesizer in my life much less an analog synth.
The goal of this project was to make a patchable synthesizer as versatile as we can while keeping the cost down. Since I know how to program C++ and have a basic understanding of electronics we chose to use an arduino.
So far we’ve stayed pretty true to that goal. With just the arduino, a resistor chip, some recycled wood, and a lot of help in the form of interface components (plugs and jacks) from my old electronics teacher we have a working synthesizer.. and to be honest the results so far are much better than we expected.
In the posts to come I’ll talk about some of the obstacles we needed to overcome and give some sources of code/schematics from where I got a few of my ideas.
After two days of soldering, she’s all wired up.. which means I finally get to stop worrying so much about hardware and focus more on cleaning up code and making this synth more functional.
I’ll be doing labels soon but for now, we have 2 square wave VCOs, 2 LFOs/envelopes, a clock generator, and a VCA.
