Synth Panels

2011-06-27T22:21:00Z

My friend/roommate Jesse and I have been building various modular synthesizer modules for what seems like a year or more now but we have yet to house any of our projects. We’ve built some VCOs, VCAs, filters, these things called Lopass Gates, but housing has been a real pain.

Recently I got a new job and now have access to a laser cutter. It is a lot of fun to play with and is proving to be very nice for making panels for our modules. So far I’ve only created a couple of prototypes, to make sure that my measurements are all correct.

Our friend Alex Langeburg designed us some graphics and has helped us with some design considerations. I’m using inkscape for the layout.

My first prototype used some translucent pink/orange acrylic, I painted it flat black and then etched the paint off and cut it with the laser. I really like the color but I don’t think it’ll work well with the rest of the colors I have for jacks, knobs, cabling and what not.

So I’ve settled on clear:

I think it will look really nice when it is back lit, though the pots cover the graphics, so we’ll have to figure out some edge lighting as well. Eventually I hope to house my project in a suitcase, or something reasonably mobile.

Toy Guitar Hacked MIDI controller

2011-06-26T21:17:00Z

I found this guitar toy at a thrift store a few months back and decided to hack it in order to make it into a usb-midi controller.

I used a teensy, and library I wrote called xnormidi, which in turn uses LUFA to do the usb layer.

I’ve placed the code on github if anyone is curious. It might not be immediately useful but it does provide an example usage of the midi library. I also have some debouncing code in there that could be pulled into another project.

Interfacing with the toy was actually not very difficult. Internally it had a microcontroller board that loaded like a slot into another board that had the panel mount buttons and a bus to the neck buttons. I simply de-soldered and removed that microcontroller board, figured out the addressing scheme of the buttons, which used a typical matrix scanning scheme, and wrote some code drive + read the matrix. I had some extra I/O so I hooked in the switch and maybe one more button on the body that wasn’t driven by the matrix.

All of the buttons except one or two on the body send CC messages, the switch also sends CC messages and when you strum the little “string” things, it sends notes based on the button you’re holding on the neck. It is pretty fun. So far I’ve just hooked it into a few synths and messed around..

Here are some photos:

opps.. a little blury

x37v web log

Synth Panels

Toy Guitar Hacked MIDI controller