Like any good lover of noise and aspiring maker of machines that make it, I think modular synthesizers are radical. They are also prohibitively expensive. I'm a stay-at-home dad with very (very) little disposable income so something that costs $300 and doesn't even make any noise until I've also purchased a handful of other $300 things isn't really an option. On the flip side, the DIY modular systems I come across, while extremely cool and inspirational, always seem more complicated than necessary by avoiding MCUs: requiring a dozen or so different ICs and (sometimes) nontrivial peripheral circuitry. So, I wanted to make a system that was suuuuuuper simple, requiring just a handful of the same parts in each module and ridiculously basic peripheral circuits.