Beats by Teensy

While it hasn't moved for a couple of years (I've been working on some slightly less ambitious projects) I've posted a video showing what it's doing at the moment. Enjoy!

I've been sidetracked recently into beta testing the new unreleased Teensy-LC from PJRC, and building an Adafruit Untztrument with Teensy-LC at its core. More on that in another project another time.

But I have contributed a 2way, 8 way and 16 way mixer back to the audio project which should clean up my design no end, as well as increasing sound quality. The beatmaker is already running the new code and works like a charm.

BEen having interrupt struggles with the sequencer. I'm sure the solution will present itself to me in a moment of insanity, as is usual.

Last night I added a synth mode t othe project, and all the buttons play the blues scale. The four pots are tweaking LFO frequencies. Great fun!!! and only a 3% CPU load to run the Synth. Very. Very. Cool :)

Still needs some work to sound like a pro synth but it's on it's way. Minimoog anyone?

It's been about 6 months since I conceived the idea.

I've got the device mostly built and wired into breadboard, excepting the LED driver for the arcade buttons, the fader, the piezo and the 3.3v leds.

I've been working mainly on the code and I'm running beta code to load up samples onto the 16Mbyte SPI flash chip and play them back (20 sample polyphony) instead of playing from SDcard (5 sample polyphony).

I have LCD backlight colours and fading implemented which will denote the current operating mode during use.

I modified the standard Teensy PS/2 library to pass through key up and key down information.

I have all the buttons triggering samples through an envelope which gives each sample many more uses; noteOn and noteOff are triggered by the pads being depressed and released. Great fun to play and operates at around 6ms Latency which is plenty good enough for me. Of course, as a sequencer, this will only affect live playing and recording, playback will be in time to the millisecond.

An example of the layout of the audio system is below: