Moon Germs

I was pretty happy with how my last PCB prototype turned out and was able to test out the hardware with much success. Rather than stick with that design, I decided to rethink the layout and hardware interface and have started on another revision of the board (because it's fun I guess?)

I've been focusing a lot more on the mechanical aspects of the PCB this time and have been experimenting with some clever ways of mounting switches/pots etc to the board itself. I've been making a point to assign 3D packages in Eagle and pushing them to Fusion 360 to sanity check as I go, which has been a really interesting workflow that I've been happy with. I've been a Fusion 360 user for a while now, and have been super impressed with the Eagle integration.

I also thought I'd take a shot at moving away from using the Teensy 3.2 dev board and placing the MCU directly. As I'm not an EE by training, this is pretty ambitious for me and a pretty fun learning experience. Here's a screenshot of the board so far. Still have a lot to do, and will probably be iterating on this for a bit until I'm happy with component placement. 

-K

First prototype of the PCB with components reflowed in my Toast-R. So far so good!

I finally finished up designing a board with all components (minus the Teensy 3.2) built in. Just sent it out to OSHpark for manufacture. This isn't the final shape I'm going for and I expect there to be a couple issues with this board, but hoping for the best!

It's been a little while and I've been staying pretty busy. For anyone who's interested in this project, I'm getting started on a V2. I'll be moving away from using modules and putting everything onto a single board. I'll also be doing some mechanical redesign and rethinking some of the UI. Had some pretty cool ideas over the past couple of months on making this thing really cool!

Stay tuned!

Just merged most of the full writeup detail from Github to the Hackaday project page. Hopefully this doesn't make the page too cluttered!

Finished up all documentation and the submission video. It's been a great sprint over these past couple days trying to bring this project to a good spot. I had a lot of fun, but now I should probably sleep. Best of luck to everyone in the finals!

Hey everyone!

With the deadline being tomorrow for the Hackaday Prize Finals, I've been putting the final touches on my submission. Over the past couple days, I've buckled down and cranked out a cool desktop app that I'm happy with. I developed it using Processing 3, which I've grown very fond of. The app connects to the device over USB and allows you to adjust and tweak the preset sounds stored in the 4 banks. It also opens up the ability to play with the low pass filter and LFO, which are disabled in standalone mode. The app affects the device in real-time, so you can hear the sound adjustments immediately. I'll be uploading a video showing how it works in a little bit.

Although I could've just created a bare-bones UI, I decided to put quite a bit of time and effort into the aesthetics. I really wanted to compliment the cyber-punkyness of the device and give the whole system a coherent theme. I also seriously needed a break from coding every now and then. I'm pretty happy with my pixelated loading screen (which was definitely inspired by Teenage Engineering's website), also shoutout to my cousin Justin for the translation.

That being said, the app still needs some work and is far from perfect. I have a long list of to-dos and cleanup which I'll hopefully get to soon. I'm still lacking a permanent parameter saving feature as the device currently looses all changes on reset (I was thinking of using the built-in SD slot on the audio shield for this). I also want to spend some time rethinking the animations on the 8x8 display. I would really like them to be more dynamic and to be more reactive to everything that's going on. I've had some ideas, but 64 pixels isn't all that much to work with (I guess that's what makes it fun though).

Super excited to have made it through to the finals! I'm really proud and honored, thanks to the judges for liking my work!

With that being said, the deadline for the finalist submissions is less than a week away, but I'm going to see if I can work in a couple more interesting features before then. As I've been thinking more and more about this project, I've really started to get a better feel for what this instrument does best. I've realized that as a monophonic, drone-y noise machine, this synthesizer sounds best in the lower registers. The de-tune feature really fattens up the sound and really reminds me of this track from the Blade Runner soundtrack. In the next couple days I'm going to see what I can do to widen the preset sounds even more and make them more dynamic. I'm also going to decrease the range of the instrument so that it focuses more in the lower range. 

I'm going to take a shot at building a simple desktop app to build your own custom sounds with minimal knobs/sliders. I want the entire experience of using the device to be straightforward and easy to use, but still very dynamic and fun!

 We'll see how far I get...

I'm currently in the final stages of completing the assembly and am now working on some documentation so I can submit this thing before tomorrow! I'm pretty happy with the results so far, and will be messing around with it all afternoon in an attempt to create something musical. I've updated the project's github page with a ton of information, photos, and files (https://github.com/friedpies/moon-germs), and will be uploading some more detailed photos and videos later today.

The final model!

The whole assembly

Thoughts and Ideas:

As I've been finishing up this version, I've had a couple thoughts and ideas about where to go from here. Although the device is fun to play with and easy to use, its current feature set is a little bit limited (which is okay). I am exploring the idea of creating a simple desktop app which can interface with the device over USB to allow deeper exploration into sound creation. The app would provide the user with a simple GUI with some knobs and sliders, and a way to preview and save sounds. The GUI could also have a graphical representation of the 8x8 matrix to allow the user to "draw" their own images to be associated with each sound. The saved sounds and 8x8 image would be then stored on the device. Below is a quick concept sketch of the app:

The PCB breakouts for the Teensy finally arrived and I proceeded to hook everything up, so far so good! Currently working on some of clean up and finalizing the code for the first prototype.