I've been tied up with worm far more than expected over these last few weeks and months, so progress has been slow. It has always been at the back of my mind but i havent really been able to push further forward with development.

In order to speed up the process to getting something making noises and getting something worthy of making a video log of for my project I've been looking at alternatives to plug holes in the project and revisit them later.

The first is the frame - while I discuss with pBone a donor instrument or perhaps constructing my own frame I'm going to use my own plastic trombone as a mounting frame for the time being. Itll be messy running wires all over and not being able to modify it, but it'll give me a great platform to test my project on.

Secondly is the onboard processing.

The plan is to create my own custom image for Raspberry Pi to run an instance of Fluidsynth and then output via a gpio mounted DAC to a speaker.

In order to plug this one I've done a random search for MIDI capable synth on the Android platform; the thought being that I could use an old phone to interprete the Arduino output until I get the Pi side up and running. Lo and behold I've managed to even find a Fluidsynth basesmd android app in the Google Play store, ideal for the stand in role!

After sitting pondering on the thought for most of this evening I'm really starting to warm to the idea of an old phone being used instead of the Pi in the project: it has a touchscreen for easy operation, easy to mount with any number of off-the-shelf holder's, has it's own battery, can connect to the Arduino via USB-otg, and has a headphone out to run to an amplifier or an active speaker.

Christ, if I can find a 5v amp I can power it all from a 5v power bank as well.

Hmmmm....