Good lord, you must have an amazing wife/support system to give you some peace while you designed this amazing toy.
Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
121–130 of 216 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#122What I love about this is how physical it is. So yeah, there's some board running DSP. but the design is amazing. It really relates to some recent posts also in HN about many objects loosing their physical UX. from an age of having buttons and tactical interfaces, everything became more touch based / app based which indeed cut price and allows easier updating. but also lacks some romance which is exactly what this de…
Agreed. That's half the reason that no matter how accurate a virtual synthesizer can be (like the Mac App Moog Model D), there's just no substitute for being able to physically fiddle the knobs and dials.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#123This is such a good idea! Kids music toys are often just purely toys tap a button, make a sound... But the skill ceiling could be so much higher, offering the ability to learn and express themselves more. Awesome work.
One of my favorite kids music toy is a mini piano where you have to replay one among 5-6 melodies (each melody is 5-10 notes that you have to memorize by ear — no lights involved) to unlock a little happy sound. This toy managed to keep both, dad and kid busy for a while.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#124What an incredible idea, I with every nursery to school had some of these!
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#125Thanks for all the kind words and feedback. There are some comments expressing interest in supporting a Kickstarter etc. If you're interested in receiving updates you can leave your email here: https://tally.so/r/Y55dXv Thanks again - this was a bit of a surprise!
Lovely project and a really great idea.
Have you come across soft tooling for injection moulding? It's a lower cost, short run approach using much less durable moulds from various materials.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#126Really cool project, super polished. The panda animation!
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#127build it at scale and make a fortune
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#128This is such a good idea! Kids music toys are often just purely toys tap a button, make a sound... But the skill ceiling could be so much higher, offering the ability to learn and express themselves more. Awesome work.
For anyone who likes the idea of better music "toys" for their kids (i.e. not toys at all, but still easy to use) but doesn't have the capacity to build stuff like this, my kids and I love the Korg Koassilator: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/kaossilator2/
You can usually get them on eBay for USD$60 - 70. You do need to bring your own speakers, but a pair of cheap PC speakers are good enough, and it's a good start on creating a whole synth + effects chain.
Speaking of which, there is also the Mini Kaos Pad, which is a dynamic effects processor: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/mini_kaoss_pad2/
This one is a little more difficult to figure out for the kids as it is a "modifier" in the chain and they haven't quite wrapped their head around that concept yet. But still, it works great, has lots of features, and is really inexpensive for such a thing.
And finally, they have a number of these mini-synths that are in the USD$30 - 50 range that are a ton of fun: https://www.korg.com/us/products/dj/monotron_duo/
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#129Wow! Very cool. How hard would it be to create a "custom" sound, where you use the sliders to adjust the Attack Decay Sustain and Release?
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#130It's not kid friendly, but in case anybody's interested I just wrote up how I made a simple "hardware" synth by bodging together a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and I2S audio module, total cost around £10 on Amazon UK. The hardware's very cheap and easy. The "default" synthesis is pretty simple but also pretty hackable (in Rust) if you want to customize it. https://github.com/Joeboy/oxynth/
Thanks for sharing!
I did some similar playing around with an ESP32 and I2S a few years ago (lockdowns were an odd time). Where I seem to remember getting stuck was how to get the phase to line up, so that each sample looped at a zero-crossing point (which is different for each frequency).
For the lazy, what did you do?
https://gitlab.com/afandian/melodicornamuse/-/blob/main/melo...