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The challenges making your own synthesizer or audio effects unit-----------------------------------------------------------------
When you want to make your own music hardware you will be faced with various challenges.
The first is finding a hardware to base it on, if you only want to make a hobby project
the best solution is probably something like MIDIBOX or maybe Axoloti. But if you want to
make professional stuff you probably will find that you have to make your own hardware.
Another option is to base it on a single board computer and make a custom board with
electronics and connectors or find some sort of MCU or CPU to use. In both cases you
have to start with making a PCB board to get you started.
Getting your custom boards made
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Once you have designed your board, you have to populate it with connectors and components.
If you are planning it on doing it yourself you have to be very good at soldering and have
a lot of equipment. Or make a big series of boards and let someone manufacture them for you,
but until then you first need to know that your board really works, so you are back to square one.
The best alternative to date is probably to use JLCPCB. There you can send your design files
and get a working board for a low price in low quantities and just have to solder on your own
connectors that you need for the board as they don’t have any connectors that they solder
on to boards. And they don’t have all possible components either and you have to use components
that they have listed, or you have to solder on the missing components they don’t have by hand.
Configure your hardware in software
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After all this you have your own board. Now you have to configure the hardware in software.
This is in most cases the biggest hurdle to get you started. Especially is no one has
documented the parts you have planned to do. This can take a lot of effort and can take months
before you get it right. So plan on severing. And some hard boring work before you get
everything partially working. And most often requires a lot of experience or a will of steel
to get you through. After a couple of months you will have something so you can begin
working on making the software for the board that will make the unique parts that will be
the basis for your product. Even here there will require some will of steel if you don’t
have experience. Prepare to search the internet for pieces of information for months and find
information. One good idea if you get stuck is to get some hints to get in the right direction
by writing a question or two once in a while in forums. Remember the internet and people there
are your best friend if you aren’t lucky enough to have a friend that has gone through this
process themselves.
Enciosure
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Now comes what is probably the hardest part. It’s about making a solid user interface and
make a enclosure for the product. You don’t only need an enclosure, you also need a screen
print or a custom overlay, but you need a custom tool to cut your printed overlay.
Another possibility is to make a front panel with custom engraving, but it can be quite costly.
The least expensive alternative to an enclosure is to make a front panel. To find an enclosure
isn't an easy task. It can require that you search for months just to find something that is
suitable, and most probably it will be too expensive and still require custom tooling, that you
need CNC machines to create, or let a company create it for you. Another option could be to
3D print, but it’s slow and best suited for small parts. It’s best used for prototypes or
one-off projects. You will probably find that you want to make a custom metal casing, or
a plastic casing. But plastic casings require custom moulds, that can cost a lot to make,
but you can your money back if you know that you will sell a huge amount of units.
And the way to know that, is by experience. If you don’t know if you're going to sell a lot
of units, then it’s best for something else of find a place that can do it cheap and
you can save the money and don’t care if you burn the money.
Front panel
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There is another alternative to casings. And that is to make a front panel that you can screw
into a eurorack. Maybe your unit doesn’t belong there, but it’s an alternative. Either way,
you probably want to look at front panels anyway as it’s a way to get away with a pre-made enclosure.
As you can se there is a lot of steps in making a product. But after making the product, the hardest
part is still to be done. And that’s selling your product.
Making things easier
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A way around this would be if there was a development board that has all needed connectors from the
start. And a platform that can be scaled down to fit your need and has preconfigured hardware and easy
to follow software examples. This would make it possible to start right away with writing you unique code,
and a expansion connector to add your custom user interface.
Are there any development boards that allow you to do this?
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One alternative could be the MIDIBOX Core 32 STM32F4, ( http://wiki.midibox.org/doku.php?id=stm32f4_module (http://wiki.midibox.org/doku.php?id=stm32f4_module) )
but it only has 192k RAM, and a MCU running at 168 Mhz. And it’s not for commercial use. One way around this
is to treat it as a classic development board, and configure it from scratch and make your own PCB
circuit board, that defeats the purpose of the whole idea. But it’s an alternative if you never plan to
make a ready made product to sell to others. But it doesn’t have any connectors on the board.
Another alternative could be Axoloti Core, ( http://www.axoloti.com/ (http://www.axoloti.com/) ) it has 8Mb of SDRAM and a similar
MCU as MIDIBOX Core 32, and runs at 168Mhz. The pros of this board is that is has connectors on the
board from start, including audio in and out, and a MIDI in and a MIDI out port and a SD card reader.
But it’s probably not something that you wuold use in a commercial product. And the software is based
on a GPL license, that in practice says that all software changes you made has to be made public.
And one only has schematics for the board that cant be loaded into a cad program, so you most likely
you need to make your own similar schematic and make your own board from scratch.
A third alternative could be Daisy, ( https://www.electro-smith.com/home (https://www.electro-smith.com/home) ) it has 64Mb of RAM and a
MCU running at 480Mhz. It has no connectors on the board, so you have to buy another board to complement
the card to get connectors like MIDI in and Audio in and out. And if you want to make a product to sell
with it, you will need to make your own board with connectors. It also has a small restricted set of
pins, that will make it a bit harder to get all the functionality that you need for a user interface.
One solution to that would be to use it together with an Arduino. And if you want to make your own
compatible board, you will find that it uses ball grid components, so you can’t probably not make a
copy at home, as you probably don’t have a re-flow oven at home to get the board soldered. And there
aren’t any schematics of the board, so you kind of need to start from scratch anyway or do a reverse
engineering of the board. So this board can't even be used as a classic development board. They have
done their best to keep you from doing you own copy of the board.
A fourth alternative - the OPUS MAX board:
( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/26 ... n-standard (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/264193494/a-music-computer-development-board-and-audio-plugin-standard) )
It has 1Mb of RAM and a MCU running at 480Mhz. It has connectors directly on the board like 4 MIDI ins,
4 MIDI outs, 2 USB, 2 Stereo outs, 2 Stereo ins and an expansion connector. So it’s a bit like Axoloti but
with 4 times more MIDI connectors, and the double amount of audio connectors but a much faster MCU.
It is still in funding at kickstarter, so it has to be funded. If you support it and buy to get
a board or else you will get your money automagically refunded after the kickstarter has ended.
It will have a schematic and even complete PCB board design files for commercial use if you pay for it.
But at least you can make your own board by copying the design unlike Daisy without twisting your head
into pieces by having schematics. A nice thing about it is that it uses a simple design like MIDIBOX Core 32,
but uses a much faster MCU with over 5 times more RAM and with processing speed similar to Daisy.
What’s interesting is that the promise a simple open plugin format for audio effects and synthesizers,
to run many simultaneous effects and synthesizers on the board. And you don’t have to write your own code
for patch loading and saving and many other things that will be done automatically for you without writing code.
As they promise to make code and examples for writing your plugin host, this will not only make it much easier to
write code, you won’t be locking down your software for their hardware. This will make it possible to effortlessly
port your code to hardware that's faster or have more memory. And the board can also be used as a classic
development board. And they promise to make a new rack format that will make it cheaper to make casing as you only
will need to make a small front panel if you want to make your own units for it. And they have promised to make
ready made cost reduced boards for bulk order for $29 to use for your commercial products around the board. And to
control your plugin you will automatically get MIDI control over USB, UART or via the plethora of MIDI ports on
the board. And when you want to control the board via your own user interface you can connect it to the expansion
port, or make a user interface with for example a Arduino and send the data as MIDI to the board over UART
without level converting.
Link to the OPUS MAX kickstarter project:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/26 ... n-standard (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/264193494/a-music-computer-development-board-and-audio-plugin-standard)
