The deed is done. The synth exists, and it works. It achieves my (vague) goal of making weird and horrible noises. It also fits its name, Maledictus Sequentia (Cursed Sequence) quite nicely. The past few weeks of work have all come together, to make this:

Learnings and Changes

So what have I learned? Well, as a start, Arduinos cannot output DC offsets, unless said offset it 0v or 5v. Had I been intelligent enough to do such research, I would have cycled through 4 digital outputs, using the faders to attenuate the 5v signal to whatever I desired, and summed them together physically on the breadboard before outputting. This would have allowed me to use the Delay() function in the Arduino IDE to control the pitch, in a similar fashion to my inspiration (clocking an analog sequencer very fast).

Another (pleasantly surprising) learning point was that Piezo speakers are very inaccurate. With all 4 faders at 0 (and the feedback knob all the way down), a very chaotic noise is released from a Piezo. From an actual speaker, it’s just a high-pitched tone (roughly 10kHz – apologies for not having any audio).

I’ve also learned that soldering is quite easy, except when plastic is involved, and that clock speed register adjustments are confusing, inaccurate and chaotic, as is breadboard.

But despite all this, I now have a synthesiser that (to my knowledge) makes sounds like no other. And I am perfectly fine with that (Even if only because no-one else is crazy/stupid enough to make a synth like this).

Thanks

This project would not have been made possible without a number of people:

  • Prakash Patel & Ashok Karavadra, for their endless help and patience in getting the electronics side of things working. They’ve both been very helpful and engaging with their approach towards helping our entire class
  • Stephen Cliff & Vijay Amlani, for helping design and manufacture the case.
  • Nayan Gilboa-Way, for designing the case in CAD software (and going stupidly over the top with the 3D renders).

And of course, you. I’m fairly certain no-one other that my university lecturers and Google’s spider bots read this, but thanks anyway. I’d say ‘stay tuned’, but I think this is the last post for a while.

Cheerio!