Tag Archives: DIY synthesizer


Arduino synthesizer with a 1-octave capacitive touch keyboard

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DIY audio synthesizers are not new. We have seen before some really cool synthesizer builds using Raspberry Pi and NXP LPC1114FN28 ARM. Here comes TinyTS, an Arduino-based credit card sized (100x65mm) synthesizer. It is a fully open-sourced design with a 1-octave capacitive touch keyboard.

TinyTS: A credit-card sized synthesizer with 1-octave touchpad keyboard

TinyTS: A credit-card sized synthesizer with 1-octave touchpad keyboard

The synthesizer parameter knobs includes:
DCO: Coarse pitch and Double. The CV out follows the keyboard and coarse pitch.
DCF: Filter peak and ENVmod.
ENV: Attack and Release affecting amplitude.

More details can be found here.

Here’s a demo video showing the TinyTS in action.

Raspberry Pi audio processor and synthesizer

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With a lot of horse power built in, Raspberry Pi can do a lot of interesting things with audio such as creating artificial sound effects, synthesizing music, etc. PiOSCBOX is a similar low-cost project to build a stand-alone audio effects processor and synthesizer using Raspberry Pi 3 and an external USB sound card. The project features an interactive user interface using a 128×64 graphic LCD and six rotary encoders. The audio processing and synthesizing requires heavy DSP capabilities, which are implemented using Pure Data. Pure Data is an open source visual programming language for musicians and artists to create a software to generate audio/video effects and 2D/3D graphics. It also allows users to interface external sensors and midi devices.

Raspberry Pi audio processor and synthesizer

Raspberry Pi audio processor and synthesizer