ADASYNTH - Arduino Based Modular Synth

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Exhibition
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Over the last year or so I have developed a patchable modular synthesizer that uses only an Arduino and a AD5206 chip. The rest of the components are simply pots, plugs, jacks, and switches.

The capabilities of this synth include:

  • 2 Square Wave VCOs with voltage input for frequency
  • Clock that generates a trigger with voltage input for rate
  • S/H Sequencer with two sequence outputs that has trigger input to call for the next sample and voltage input for sampling. This module also uses two switches, one for recording the voltages and the other to switch between which sequence is being modified.
  • Envelope which generates an envelope voltage. This has inputs for clock and decay rate. It has two switches, one for looping the envelope without waiting for a trigger and the other activates or deactivates attack on the envelope.
  • VCA This module accepts a voltage input and a signal. It will use the voltage input and translate it to volume on the output.

Here's a pretty picture of it with no labels yet:

Here's another of just the worker components:

Here's a link to a sloppy demo video: ADASYNTH Prototype Demo - YouTube

For more information check out the tumblr: http://adasynth.tumblr.com

2

wow that is super awesome!
any plans on releasing the code for it? i would love to make one.

also, props on the epic beard!

3

i'm planning on releasing code and schematics, yes.

this is my first arduino project and also my first synthesizer that i've built or designed, so it's taking a while to get all the kinks out of it as I am just learning from experimentation.

the hardware side is pretty much done, just needs some cleaning up of code.

4

awesome! its a killer first project

5

This i just great. Kudos for the nice project.

I give +1 on the code. Would be great to have a gallery where people post their ADASYNTH Forks and Housings.

Greetings

apogee

6

Yeah definitely. I'd like to put all this stuff up on a site that isn't tumblr.

I'll let you guys know when that happens.

7

Yeah definitely. I'd like to put all this stuff up on a site that isn't tumblr.

Why did you use tumblr and not something like blogger?

Mowcius

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It's just more simple. The only thing it lacks is a comment system which I feel isn't really that important. Especially since they added /ask. Now if someone has a question I can make a new entry responding to it.

9

that is very cool i love arduino synths

my arduino oscillator/envelope generator is actually going to be made in to a standard "synthesizers.com" modular synth module. (not by them yet, by me :slight_smile: ) its a completely different animal though, it is a phase accumulator in the ISR, main loop takes a MIDI input and looks at the midi note, if one has been previously played, then it does a glide. it looks at the velocity as well and does accent and stuff it outputs binary numbers which are the address of a ROM chip which goes to DAC chip.(PWM to DACs Vref makes a good free VCA).

it can not make those cool wierd sounds though, its just supposed to do basslines.

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very interesting. mine is only capable of square wave output unless you want to patch it up a little more complex.

i wish i knew more about electronics. even the oscillators are just digital writes from the arduino. this made it a lot harder to have two VCOs going at once especially when everything else is needs to also be reading and writing constantly.

but yeah, i am digging your sounds. very nice acid bass. :wink:

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If you are doing lots of analogreads you can try this in your setup which makes it do them a lot faster.

I did not notice any difference in response of the pots at all.

 setBit(ADCSRA,ADPS2) ; //Speed up analogread prescaler to 1 mhz
 clearBit(ADCSRA,ADPS1) ;
 clearBit(ADCSRA,ADPS0) ;
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Yeah, I already have it using code like that. It definitely helped a lot when I changed the prescaler.