Since the first electronic hobbyist wired up a multivibrator to a keyboard many decades ago, electonic synthesisers have been a staple of home-made projects. Now with the proliferation of significantly powerful microcontrollers it’s possible to make a synth that surpasses many of the high-end models from days gone by.
Among those we’ve seen of late perhaps none does this better than [Povle] with their Spark portable keyboard. It’s a tiny thing that reminds us of those little Casio synths of the 1980s, but in its 3D printed case it packs a load of features.
Hardware wise it’s an ESP32 with a 3D printed keyboard using keyswitches. There are a load of pots for sound adjustment, and buttons for functions. A small OLED display shows what’s going on. Software wise it relies upon the AMY synth library, and there are repositories for both its hardware and software.
There’s a demo video we’ve placed below, and in it you hear the keyboard at work. And here maybe we’ve saved the best until last, because alongside being a fully featured synth, it’s also a sampler and a Bluetooth MIDI keyboard. Is there nothing this thing can’t do!
Oh my. That would have been my dream in the early 80s. To fix my DX-7 to my SG would have been a laugh to try, so I made do with a VL-Tone, which was fun. But now – I may well have a go.
Brilliant! And the fun/unit currency ratio seems very high…
Nice! Good to see AMY library getting use here :) It is pretty powerful. I was doing a fun attiny modular project because it was fun to get things to sync up and work, but this is pretty sweet and doable too. My youtube feed is getting slack lol.
nice! very nice.
in two weeks on AliExpress for $30
i just have a lot of trouble understanding the ‘why’ for a project like this. i like to hack to accomplish something i can’t get ahold of, but tiny keyboards have been done to death in the marketplace, and at a good price and with usb/midi output too
For me, the “why” is customization and reuse. I have hopes to build a very different midi keyboard, and this gives some ideas I may want to steal.
I don’t know why you bother reading hackaday, or waste your time writing consistently negative comments.
Not a hack. But with proper(v2) pcb, it is something that I’m definitely waiting for ;)