Hardware synthesizers are wonderful, especially when they’re homebuilt. Jarek Ziembicki’s AVRSYN started life as an experiment to see if it was possible to cram a complete virtual analog synth into an affordable off-the-shelf microcontroller chip. He succeeded in creating a dual oscillator MIDI-compatible synth that even includes a knob-based user interface. Paul Maddox quickly saw the potential of this little device, ported the design to the more powerful Atmel ATMEGA16 processor and created a ready-to-build circuit board. These days, the project is helmed by Australian Laurie Biddoph who offers AUS$18 PC boards and AUS$86 component kits.
The AVRSYN is impressive because of its incredibly low cost and complete reprogrammability. In essence, it’s a user-programmable synthesizer experimenter’s kit. Even the digital to analog circuitry is unusual. Rather than using an off-the-shelf DAC chip, Ziembicki implemented a 16-bit discrete resistor network using precision resistors. This approach is inexpensive and introduces a little bit of uncertainty, since every unit will sound unique because of manufacturing differences. The project is slowly taking on a life of its own: AVRSYN enthusiast Daniel Kruszyna has updated the software with full ADSR envelopes and additional waveforms and I recently managed to get rudimentary PWM oscillator modulation working on my test rig.
AVRSYN Monophonic Virtual Analog Synth Kits
Okay, this could be good…
Combine this with a nice Boxes'n'Wires programmer / compiler that has prebuilt modules plus room to program your own and this would be a fantastic learning aid and tool for the more experimental Bidule/Max type musicians.
Imagine wiring up your custom synth on the computer and compiling it to the chip to take on stage..
is there a way you could make an appegiator with this and any way to make it polyphonic?
AVR Synth, electronics…
Came across this fancy little project by Jarek Ziembicki / Elby Designs during this summer and figured it’d make a neat one to test building a rack module. Compared to my earlier projects, I figured I’d also first (for once) gather all the …
AVR Synth, putting it together…
Time to bag this one up then! As I anticipated, the clear plexi glass covers about to be binned were just the thing for the casing of my AVR Synth. From the company perspective (where I work, that is), the problem with these was that the plexi glasses …