Spring Break 2010 – Synthesizer Work!

This past week was my Spring Break – classes are going reasonably well, and I’m really enjoying my Electronics I course; it has rejuvenated my desire to work on my modular synthesizer! So much so, in fact, that I furiously worked on the project which I hadn’t touched for about 2 years (and hadn’t touched for about a year prior to that, either!), and have made a large amount of progress. My Modular Synthesizer is really only semi-modular, in that it it built into a (1′H)x(2′W)x(4″D) rectangular case that I built from 1/8″ thick, florescent green acrylic that I bought from US Plastic about three years ago. I lined the back of the front panel with foil tape to help contrast the plugs and jacks from the innards; being able to see the insides is kind of distracting, as I found out when I first mocked up some pieces of equipment several years ago (plus, it provides a convenient grounding plane).

I chose my first modules and purchased some ready-made PCBs from Ray Wilson about three years ago: a VC-LFO, a VCO, a VCF, and a State-Variable VCF (which he sent to me for free because he somehow lost track of my order and didn’t send it for over a month). I started populating one of the boards back then, but then school got in my way, and I pretty much hadn’t touched them until this past Monday.

This past week, I finished all four modules and have them mounted to the front panel and working! Here is a view of the front panel, upside down and displaying all of its delicious insides:

At this point, I need to get access to an oscilloscope so that I can calibrate the waveforms and get an idea of what voltage ranges I am working with and how steady they are across frequency ranges. I also have to get to work on the sequencer (which all of the components on the right side of the above picture are for), which I have built (for the most part) on a breadboard. I have already started soldering it on a protoboard. I also just remembered that this still exists! I think I made that page during my Junior year of High School.

In other news, I’ve got only about 2 feet of solder left in the one-pound spool that I bought almost 10 years ago; I probably used ~1/4 of the thing over the past week. >.<