Amazing the things we do for our little ones. I built a toddler-friendly keyboard for my son. He's still playing some form of piano 6 years later, no longer with his fists or feet. https://blog.afandian.com/2019/09/ux-for-toddlers/
Beautifully done!
Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
151–160 of 216 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#152This is phenomenal, but my biggest question is (which is probably a more of a long-term one that comes from genuine curiosity/fascination, not doubt): does she use it/enjoy it? I'm so curious to see what happens over time. Does she learn the functions of these buttons, years before having words for what they're doing? Does she write some music? Does she grow up expecting things with knobs to be this interactive/creat…
3-year-olds actually have quite a vocabulary, so they can certainly talk about what the knobs are doing, maybe just not as accurately as adults.
Regarding discovering functionality: The author mentions Montessori stuff, and the philosophy there is unguided discovery, "let them figure out by themselves". Not sure if that's how the author is planning to use this too, though.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are these, are they worth the money? I have seen these before, but thought they might be crappy "jokes". However, if they are decent, I would love to play around with them.
It’s pretty capable hardware, but in my personal opinion the UI sucks. It falls into the category of “why did you make this hard on purpose” and I resent it.
Yeah, I agree. The size and price are attractive and they are pretty capable, but the UI is a bit more complex than ideal. It either needs better labeling of functions/combos (which is hard to do with the size) or more buttons/knobs to reduce the number of combos. On that note, the cases do a bit to aid with the labeling, but they also increase the price by more than one might expect. With better UI, they could have been truly amazing.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#154Thanks 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!
It’s a great project! I’ve got some experience with small batch production and I’ve written an email. Check your spam!
Thanks, I've responded :)
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#155Reminds me of the work of Love Hultén: https://www.lovehulten.com
He builds beautiful, colorful, retro-futuristic audio-visual art pieces Many are synths.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#156I've been learning CAD, 3d printing, PCB design and brushing up on my embedded programming... all with the goal of being able to build toys for/with my son. It's incredible how accessible it is in todays world, made possible by these advancements: - incredibly powerful and cheap microprocessors (esp-32) - Fast, high precision desktop 3d printers - Affordable small batch PCB manufacturing - LLM's to advise on circuit…
Same, I recently got into Arduino so i could build a toy idea I had for my kid (a sort of "keepy-uppy" paddle game). I've always avoided Arduino projects because I don't like to code in my spare time (its my day job) and also learning how to wire things seemed daunting -- LLMs solved both of those problems for me (Claude's wiring tutorials are awesome and the code is simple enough that it can one-shot it).
I also bought a Bambu A1 3D Printer and it is unexpectedly way more fun and useful than I thought it would be. I designed the toy in TinkerCAD and it printed out beautifully (I also have been printing out lots of other toys and yes, useful things for around the house and for other projects).
Next steps are learning Fusion 360 and figuring out PCBs -- That also seemed daunting to me but its nice to see other amateur hobbyists are seemingly picking it up with not much difficulty.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#157It'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...
were you using single cycle waveforms or longer samples? in the former case, I guess there's not much to it, you just cycle through the waveform (in which case the waveform you choose would usually start and end at a zero crossing by construction, like sines, triangles, etc - or, if it does not, well, that will just create extra harmonics that might or not be desirable).
For the second case, it's more subtle. Most samplers that implement this feature will assume correct loop points (usually, but not necessarily at a zero crossing) are chosen manually by the user. Some of them implement cross-fading at the looping point to make that more forgiving, but that may be CPU/RAM intensive for some devices. If you're referring to small clicks you may get at the start and stop of sample playback, it's fairly common to use very short (ms or less) fade-in/fade-out to avoid that. There's a lot of books out there, but the main one I've read and enjoyed is this one, that happens to be free: https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/synthesis/. it's more of a textbook than a cookbook.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#158There's a fun podcast by Arman Bohn/Distropolis (who himself has made some cool small-batch hardware synths) where he interviews makers of small hardware synths, https://open.spotify.com/show/30USGHPeGQ9ZyWQDyRnfcv might be of interest.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#159As someone who has never 3d printed anything, I'm surprised by how clean the case looks as opposed to what we usually see. Why is it so smooth?
Sanding and polishing, likely.
Nah, it just came out like that (i printed it :D)
We experimented with ironing, but you can't see it in those views. The A1 is a pretty good printer OOTB. There were a few iterations on the case design though to optimise the edges.
Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter
#160Putting aside the beauty of both the synth and its purpose, what I'm curious about is the learning process in making this. The running theme is that you picked up several new skills 'from cold'. That in itself is impressive enough. How did you approach learning:
- the necessary basic electronics;
- PCB design;
- 3D CAD;
- your particular iterative process,
among other things? I get the impression you built things incrementally, observed what happens and learnt via that feedback loop? Maybe others could share their own feedback loops, too.