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prajwal1121 / Portable-Synth

OP-1 style portable groovebox based around Teensy 4.1
GNU General Public License v3.0
384 stars 24 forks source link

Experienced C++ Developer and OP-1 owner, How can I help? #4

Open acidtonic opened 3 years ago

acidtonic commented 3 years ago

I have been dreaming of creating something like this for awhile now. I have an OP1 and wanted to develop my own software on it.

I am very interested in this project and I would love to help with the code. I'd have to first build a board which would be a bit challenging for me as I can solder, yet with the pins so close it makes me nervous I'd ruin something.

What are your current areas of interest with the software side? I'd be interested in helping write some midi/sequencer engines and such. I'm the principal developer for huge C++ projects for my day job and can help with organizing the project structure if desired.

I'm a percussionist, OP1 owner and I have a lot of odd musical ideas that would be cool for a groovebox like this... Let's work together.

acidtonic commented 3 years ago

I have a cad guy on staff and I snagged him after work to look at this.... we managed to open up the project in Kicad on linux. Got the autorouter setup and components loaded. Not sure if we need to submit this and make some boards or if we should just breadboard it out at this stage.

Ordered a few Teensy's and the required chips. Should be arriving tomorrow.

Still very interested in working with you. Let me know your thoughts.

acidtonic commented 3 years ago

Soldered about 30 cherrymx keys to breakout boards, decided to use larger prototype boards for now since I don't nee the polished design. I found 10x22cm double-sided boards and will be combining various elements of your design along with mine into a much larger board for now.

I decided to order fancy audiophile DACs and amplifiers for mine, and optoisolated IO which will complicate the design a bit. I wanted to also introduce the idea of multiple "jacks" on the top of the board where different chips can be added or removed into color coded "slots". So similar to your idea where samples are loaded to flash with a small delay, I'd like to go farther and allow removing/mixing/matching different banks of flash chips to allow swapping samples in physical form.

I also wanted to go all in and provide 2 or 3 full-size 5pin MIDI jacks to my design since I'm planning to implement a MIDI looper with external/internal clock-sync and solo/hold-to-mute modes.

I am debating on whether to add a second Teensy 4.0 to offload the MIDI sequencing, such that internally the keys will actually be triggering MIDI on the first-teensy that the second (main) board will receive and operate purely off midi. This way I could turn off the second Teensy and only have a "dumb" midi controller/looper..... Then the main Teensy4.1 wouldn't need to do anything except handle MIDI input for the various synth engines I plan to add.

More stuff arriving tomorrow. Still hoping you respond and are working on this still.... :)