Here’s a musical entry for the Fubarino Contest that turned out to be rather delightful. First, [Mats] shows off his musical knowledge by using the notes H, A, and D to play the chord that unlocks the Easter eggs. What’s that you say? There’s no H on your keyboard? You’re wrong. In the German music tradition B natural is known as H. This is what allowed Bach to write a tune that spells his name.
[Mats] is hacking on his PlingPlong synthesizer. The first Easter egg—which you can see in the clip after the break—launches with the H-A-D chord in the lower octave, spelling out our URL on the 7-segment displays. But we prefer the second egg, launched with the chord in the upper octave, which is shown above. It uses the 3×5 LED grid to scroll out the address; in this still image an H is displayed.
This is an entry in the Fubarino Contest for a chance at one of the 20 Fubarino SD boards which Microchip has put up as prizes!
nice easter egg but… I WANT THE SYNTH
I might make a few of them when I’m managed to get the firmwares to be updateble from the SD card. Follow me on twitter and you’ll get notified if and when I’m successful. ^_^
Nicely done, Mats! Merry Christmas!
It’s a great looking synth, but I have fat fingers, I wonder if its possible to build a card slot for the keys that lead to a full sized keyboard, do some reprogrammed tunes and voices, or even a bank of card slots, I could rebuild an old organ that way.
On the site, the designer says the PIC chip, presumably the big square one in the middle, reads all the keys and controls. It interprets them and sends MIDI messages to the other chip, an Atmel, that runs Midi Vampire, which makes MIDI synths out of ATMEGAs. Looking round the web people have used MIDI Vampires in all sorts of projects. Mats says he designed that part of the circuit board to be self-contained and easily replaceable with different synths.
The keys are read using the PIC’s internal capacitive sensing. I haven’t read the code but I’d imagine it’d be easy enough to replace that bit of the code with something that reads keys through the I/O pins some other way, as long as it returns the right results. Might just need a bit of massaging to fit in.
This is all information from following the link, the guy looks like he’d be friendly, you should email him.
Yea, I’m basically a friendly guy. :-) It even happens every now and then that I send out PCBs and some of the hard-to-get parts for free to those who ask.
I’d be happy to collaborate with someone more musically talented person than myself for modding or redesigning this project into something better and cooler. I’m really just a tech-head that like to design stuff that blinks and sounds (and who doesn’t like that?)