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Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

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Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#191

Post by yumraj »

bigiain wrote: post #174
brudgers wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminded me of a BlipBlox… https://blipblox.com

Reminded me of Teenage Engineering's Pocket Operators: https://teenage.engineering/store/pocket-operators I have a few of those, and heaps of my friends gat sucked deeply into playing with them at the expense of whatever they actually came over for. "Nah, I'm not hungry. You should all eat without me, I'll just finish tweaking this groove." They're aimed (as the company name hints) as a little older than 3 year olds.…

What would you say is the best one to start with, say for a young middle schooler? Maybe best 3, in order?

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#192

Post by beAbU »

I want to commend you for making this actually musical. Too often these basic synths aimed at kids are little more than a noise maker unless you really know what you are doing.

My spouse and I are into music and we are pretty serious choristers. We have our first little one on the way this December, and we definitely want to expose them to making music from a very young age. Your synth looks like an excellent way to do that, as it does not seem possible to get it in a state where it's just making horrible noises, every state will be some new pleasant little jingle.

Bravo!

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#194

Post by kentbrew »

fainpul wrote: post #32

> A 3D-printed enclosure is fine for a prototype, but a real product likely needs injection-molded parts, which require expensive tooling. For kid-friendly toys, yes. But for older users not necessarily: https://teenage.engineering/products/po

Maybe consider vacuforming?

https://www.instructables.com/Vacuum-Forming-for-Free/

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#195

Post by afandian »

Joeboy wrote: post #137
afandian wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I don't really understand your issue sorry, but my thing basically just writes the audio output to a buffer, and the DMA and PIO "automatically" send that to the I2S output. There's also some messing about with ping ponging between two DMA buffers to avoid gaps between each buffer write audio. I guess things might be quite different on the ESP32. Edit: Ok I glanced at your code, if I read it right it seems like you'r…

Thanks! This was just some playing round years ago, so I don't remember much about it. I don't remember if calculating sin() at runtime was too slow, or I wanted to avoid polyphonic O(n) inside the buffer loop, or what. I bet it uses a LUT anyway.

I much prefer your method of just rotating the phase!

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#196

Post by afandian »

dimatura wrote: post #157
afandian wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sa…

Thanks! Reading the code again, looks like I was filling up buffer of 256 x 16 bit samples.

I think the issue with looping at arbitrary points was word alignment. You need to give it a whole buffer. So you'd have to do some nasty bit-shifting.

Per other reply, I think doing it live is probably easisest!

Thanks for the recommendation. If I ever get back into this I'll take a look.

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#197

Post by redbell »

random_moonwalk wrote: post #116

Thanks 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!

> this was a bit of a surprise!

That's one of the coolest parts of HN! This post was posted five days ago and went totally unnoticed by the community, probably, even OP has forgotten about it. Thankfully, HN had what is called Second Chance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) and since this post is a masterclass in building a physical product, the mods decided to bring it back by featuring it on the front page, where it finally got the attention it deserved. A true masterpiece indeed!

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#198

Post by eimrine »

elric wrote: post #60
fainpul wrote: post #32

> A 3D-printed enclosure is fine for a prototype, but a real product likely needs injection-molded parts, which require expensive tooling. For kid-friendly toys, yes. But for older users not necessarily: https://teenage.engineering/products/po

Wood is also pretty child friendly. But neither injection molding nor carpentry will protect a synth from a child dunking it in a puddle of water.

The spare board will solve this.

Re: Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

#199

Post by jeffalyanak »

NobodyNada wrote: post #146
random_moonwalk wrote: post #116

Thanks 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!

That is fantastic, I love it! If I may submit an extremely pedantic music nerd bug report: at 46s in the video demo ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qboig3a0YS0&t=46s ), the display should read Bb instead of A#, as the key of C minor is written with flats :) (The precise rule is that a diatonic scale must use each letter name for exactly one note, e.g. you can't have both G and G# in the same key, and you can't skip…

I'm pretty sure that NobodyNada knows this, but for pedants out there using Bb instead of A# is specifically a classical European music notation thing.

There's nothing wrong with using A# and plenty of other notations do. For a modern, hacker-y example, tracker notation only uses sharps).

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