One of the roughly 8,000 projects I'm currently working on is a small synthesizer built almost entirely on an Arduino. The only external chips are the DAC and the opto-isolator for the MIDI input. It remains to be seen whether the Arduino will be fast enough to pull this off. I would like to make it a normal 1-osc subtractive synth, but Adam (who has far more experience with microcontrollers than I) says that the Atmega 16 (the Arduino's brain) isn't fast enough to do the real-time math necessary for a resonant filter. We'll just go ahead and see about that. I have a sneaking suspicion he is right; when my DAC shows up from Digi-Key, I'll find out. If I can't do subtractive synthesis, I'll just do FM and leave it at that. That will be nearly as fun. In any case, despite the artiness of the shot, you can clearly see that it has six knobs, one switch, and one LED. You can probably make out the corner of the MIDI input on the upper right. The entire thing fits in a Hammond 1690BB box, believe it or not, as there isn't much external to the Arduino. I thought about not even having panel knobs, and just making it controlled by a VST plugin or some such, but that thought left me feeling slightly just a little bit gay, so I went ahead and did a panel. After wiring it, I wished I had gone the first route. Granted, a plain grey box with an LED on the front wouldn't have been very sexy, but I wouldn't have had to solder that rat's nest together, either. In any event, I'm mostly documenting this through my Flickr page. The photoset is here. I almost certainly won't be able to put up the code when I'm done, as it will almost certainly contain Audio Damage IP (hey, why reinvent the wheel?) but if it doesn't, or if I'm able to remove/replace it and dumb it down a bit, I will. In any event, the next post you'll see here on AI about this particular subject will be a YouTube video of me quaffing from the Flagon Of Victory as I perform Grindhouse Greatest Hits on my lil' Blip.

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