DIY electronic music makers, warm up your soldering irons: A pair of hardware hacking designers have created a miniature two-button, solar-powered synthesizer with a 3-D printed wrist-strap housing, and the full set of plans are posted online for you to make your own.
Most synthesizers take the form of piano keyboards, with multiple octaves of black and white keys and a batch of knobs that turn sine waves into a sawtooth among a million other audio tweaks. The product from Lucerne-based artists/designers Felix Bänteli and Roman Jurt is much, much simpler. It comprises a small plastic casing with a nob and a mini jack on either side of an ATtiny13 transistor, flanked by a piezo speaker and a tiny solar panel. That panel gives the device the ability to make and tweak sound — either privately through the headphones or publicly through the speaker — anywhere one desires.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
The solar panel really doesnt lend itself to this thing being played live (live music venues generally being dark). I wouldnt imagine itd be that hard to hack in a battery though.
The solar panel really doesnt lend itself to this thing being played live (live music venues generally being dark). I wouldnt imagine itd be that hard to hack in a battery though.