Ben Davis, Darcy Neal and Ross Fish collaborated with Paul in early 2017 this Monolith Synth.  It was shown at Tested and the San Mateo Maker Faire.

The Monolith Synth is interactive sound sculpture, with 40 “arcade” buttons on the front as a percussive step sequencer and 2 touch-sensitive side panels for direct performance.

Typical usage scene at Maker Faire, with kids and adults playing with it non-stop all weekend long.

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The kids have been jamming nonstop on the #teensy monolith synth made by #moffenzeefmodular #malekko and #ladybrainstudios

A post shared by Darcy Neal (@drc3p0) on May 20, 2017 at 12:43pm PDT

This crazy adventure started with Kickstarter reached out to me, only 6 weeks before Maker Faire, looking to showcase 4 successful projects in their booth. They wanted to show “creative tools” and how people used them. So I reached out to a few synthesizer folks I’ve met and who’ve used Teensy. They also suggested bringing it to Tested to make a video. So it began…

From the beginning I had a step sequencer using illuminated arcade buttons in mind. So I quickly designed this little I/O expander board and sent it off to OSH Park’s Super-Swift service.

The whole project came together over just 4 weeks. Our first meetup was just to discuss what to build, followed a week later by our first build night. By then the I/O expander boards had arrived. We made not the final Monolith, but 3 breadboard prototypes, so the software development side could begin!

Another meetup focused only on software. Almost all the software was developed on these prototype panels.

In this picture you can also see the panel layout sketches on the notepad on the right side, and a blue tape model underneath on the table, which we made to get an idea of the overall size.

Ross and Darcy had synthesis plans that needed a signal-controlled PWM waveform and improvements to the envelope feature, so I worked on improvements to the Teensy Audio Library while they wrote the Arduino sketch code.

The day before our next meetup, I started turning those sketches into a design for the laser cutting. I made this 1/4 scale model of the front and side pieces. At this point, none of the back side or interior ribs (for strength) had been designed, and you can see the model lacks the many holes for screws & brackets which joined everything.

Only 2 weeks before Maker Faire we had an epic 13-hour build day where all the final parts were laser cut and assembled. Here’s a photo of Darcy & Ben putting the panels together on my kitchen counter!

All the clear acrylic plastic parts were completely drawn, with all mounting holes, and made that day.

Here’s the complete layout of all parts (mk2017_design):

Here’s a large high-res copy of this image, and a big ZIP file with all the original Corel Draw files for anyone who wishes to try making their own.

While the laser did most fabrication work, other steps like countersinking for the potentiometers were needed. It was indeed an epic 13 hour day of making.

A couple days later, I spent a whole day completing the wiring we couldn’t get done in those 13 hours. Erin Murphy (the “Soldering Goddess” at PJRC) put in a few hours on aesthetic improvements to the messy tangle of wires from so many buttons.

Just a few days later we had our last “build” session, to get the 3 separately written Arduino sketches merged and working together as one integrated project. Even though everything has been designed to go together, this session went very late. Ben did much of the heavy lifting to merge the 3 programs.

This is the final audio DSP system settled upon that late night.

Here’s a large high-res copy of this image.

This was the first actual usage of the Monolith, well past 1am when we finally had it all up and running.

The next day I took it all apart and packed all the pieces and spare parts into these 2 big boxes, weighing in at 55 and 40 pounds!

This is the first time I’ve ever shipped a project to Maker Faire, rather than driving a truck or hauling cases of checked baggage on a plane. So much easier, and it allowed time to work on a nice handout card. After some back and forth with the others and last-minute proof reading by Robin, who caught what would have been embarrassing typos and grammatical errors, we sent this card off to be fast-turn printed.

Here is a printable PDF file for the front side.

Here is a printable PDF file for the back side.

Darcy and I flew to San Francisco early and spent the day with Tested, putting it back together while they shot that awesome video. Sometime I hope to have even 1/10th that sort of video production skill.

Since it was already put together, we had little to do setup-wise. Friday morning Ben, Ross and Darcy did some adjustments of the sound levels which really made it come to life in the space. For anyone who wishes to dig deeper into the technical details, the complete source code is available on Github.

All weekend long people really enjoyed playing with it. There were many really awesome moments, like this young & determined girl playing with the front panel (Facebook link).

Here is Kickstarter’s coverage of the event. Scroll down a bit to the part about Teensy. 🙂

During the 3 days of Maker Faire, things went very well. We did experience a couple minor issues. Massive electrical noise from so many other projects played havoc with the capacitive touch sensing. Saturday evening I rewrote the code to look for changes from an average rather than just an increase from a threshold, which allowed it to usually work well enough. The other tech issue was a bass. When turned up louder, the bass notes would shake all the plastic panels, rattling screws and even some of the connectors loose at time. Easy to fix.

Towards the end of Sunday, the Maker Faire folks came around and gave up an award. At first I shrugged it off, since they’ve done the same for other stuff I’ve brought in prior years. But those were the blue ribbons. Apparently the only hand out one of these red one each in “zone”. They said it’s a big deal…

Really, the best thing about this year was working with a great team. Ross, Darcy and Ben really stepped up and did a great job on so many parts.

 

Shortly after Maker Faire 2017, this article was posted to the DorkbotPDX website.  Since that time, the DorkbotPDX blog section has vanished.  We’re reposting it here, to preserve this project’s history.  A copy of the original can also be found at the internet archive.

On 2018, the OctoWS2811 LED board was added to the Monolith Synth project and shown at the Teardown 2018 conference.

The Monolith Synth will make its next public appearance at Portland’s Winter Lights Festival in February 2019.

Branan Riley has published a series of very informative tutorials  – Exploring Rust on Teensy.

The tutorials are targeted at people who have a basic knowledge of Rust and “lightweight” embedded development experience.  The first tutorial covers bootup of the processor to getting the LED to blink – with a good number of topics covered in between.  Parts two and three go on to cover serial communication and hardware allocation.  Each of the tutorials has quite a lot of information and detailed explanations of a number of topics important in embedded development.  Overall this series is a great way to get going on programming Teensy using Rust.

Branan has indicated that the next tutorial in the series will cover DMA (Direct Memory Access) and interrupts will be in another upcoming tutorial

Update on the Teensy/rust stuff: DMA as a Future works! And I think I've convinced myself it's safe! I wanted to do interrupts, but I might save those for another post. That means I'm really ready to finish the prose and get it up!

— Brananarchy (@branan) November 11, 2018

The tutorial series can be found on Github.

Forum user Austin519 made a stylish, sound reactive LED light up coat.

The coat features 673 WS2812 LEDs driven by a Teensy 3.2, Prop Shield, and an ADMP401 MEMS microphone.  It’s powered bu 2 5200mAh lipo batteries.  It includes some user controls to change the pattern, sound reactivity, and overall brightness.

Tomash Ghzegovsky made a very cool DIY drum machine for the 2017 Fasma Festival

The goal of the project was to come up with something small, affordable, and buildable in just a few hours.  The result was this portable, battery-powered drum machine.

While this drum machine may be small in size, it’s not small on features.  It has 4 voices (kick, tom, snare, and hat) and 4 parameter controls per voice – pitch, decay pitch modulation, and distortion.  A 9V battery will power this little guy for up to 7.5 hours.  More information on the features can be found on this GHZ LABS page.

Tomash put some great documentation together so that you can build your own.  A manual, schematics, bill of materials, gerber files, and firmware are all available on this GitHub page.

Kerry Scharfglass got this 28″ Surface Studio.

The “feels like Minority Report” touch/pen interface was less than ideal for KiCAD, so he build this one-handed keyboard macro pad.

Watching people use the Surface studio has been interesting.  It seems to have some great potential, but functionality with most software programs is lacking and seems to make the Surface awkward to use.

This project is a great example of using Teensy and some DIY ingenuity to improve usability.

Designing a PCB from the comfort of your couch seems pretty enticing.  Maybe DIY projects like this one can make this a reality.

Tony Brewer, forum user tonton81 developed a library for a master board to control multiple slave boards.

This library allows you to take advantage of the speed of SPI when communicating between 2 Teensys, making it much faster than ordinary serial.

The lengthy forum thread where this library was developed documents the collaborative effort that made it happen.

The code, along with some details on the features, can be found on GitHub.

 

 

Robin Baumgarten created the Quantum Garden, a beautiful interactive art installation that visualizes the STIRAP (stimulated Raman adiabatic passage) quantum process.

The piece uses 228 neopixel rings with 16 LEDs each.  Inside each ring is a springy door stopper that when touched generate fractal-like effects.  It uses 3 Teensy 3.2 boards and a PC running a Python script to simulate the quantum problem.

The Quantum Garden is connected to the Quantum Black Box, a sophisticated software device developed by quantum physicists.  When people touch the springs they aren’t just making pretty light patterns happen, they are generating inputs that will be processed by the Quantum Black Box and used to help solve an important scientific research problem.

Additional information on the project can be found on the Quantum Garden web site.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Turku Schools of Science and the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at Aalto University, and sponsored by the Centre for Quantum Engineering.

Frank Adams came up with a “nearly universal” USB controller to allow users to breathe life back into the keyboards from old lap tops.

Frank saw a lot of forum posts from people asking how to revive a keyboard from an old, broken laptop.  Many of the answers were to the tune of “it can’t be done” or “it’s too hard”, so he set out to come up with a solution.  The final result is clever controller board that works with almost all keyboards.  One side of the board uses a Teensy-LC for FPC cables with up to 26 pins.  The other side uses a Teensy-32 for FPC cables with up to 34 pins.

Check out this Instructibles page for detailed information on how to build this yourself.

Code for the project is available in this GitHub repository.

 

Adam Haile and Dan Ternes of Maniacal labs created Bixel, an incredible interactive LED panel.

This incredible 16×16 display features SK9822 LEDs, each with a pushbutton, and 595 shift registers soldered to a massive 500x500mm PCB.  A Teensy 3.6 scans the buttons and sends the data to a Raspberry Pi 3 that drives the LEDs over a USB serial connection.

There is a great write up the project on the Maciacal Labs web site.

Design files and code are available on GitHub.

Matt Bradshaw designed and built PolyMod, a very cool, open source, polyphonic, modular digital synthesizer.

The PolyMod can operate in polyphonic (poly) mode making each module able to play multiple sounds, generating chords and harmonies.

This synth is entirely digital using a Teensy 3.6 with a Teensy Audio Shield to replicate traditional analog functions in software.  This approach allows users to easily create polyphonic patches, something that can be more challenging in analog systems.  This project also has the advantage of being a fairly low cost way to get into modular synthesis.

When the synth is powered up, the Teensy scans each of the module sockets and for each one detected, creates a virtual equivalent in software.  When a key on the keyboard is pressed, the Teensy coverts the data to a control voltage (CV) signal, which can be connected to any of the modules to generate sound.

Current modules include an oscillator, filter, envelope, low frequency oscillator (LFO), amplifier, and noise generator.

More details on the PolyMod can be found on the HackaDay project page.

Code can be found in this GitHub repository.