“A guy called Tom” made the Polaron, a 16 step, 6 track digital DIY drum machine.

Driven by his curiosity to understand and experiment with interaction patterns on digital musical intruments, Tom made the Polaron.  It combines features from other drum machines that he knows and loves as well as new features he found useful during development.  The current list of features includes:

• 16 step sequencer
• 6 instrument tracks
• 2 pots for parameter control
• parameter locks: all instrument parameters can be recorded for each step
• different pattern length for each instrument track
• midi sync
• crunchy 12bit stereo outputs

This video show the Poaron in action with a Waldorf Blofeld keyboard synthesizer

The project is fully open source with the code available on GitHub

There is also Wiki page available with instructions on how to build your own