Skip to main content

Building a Zynthian

I stumbled upon the Zynthian open source synthesizer platform project some months ago and found myself visiting the site even more often than hacker news. Eventually, I ended up buying a Zynthian build kit and did not suffer buyer's remorse since I was looking for a new hobby project anyways which would not be at least entirely coding.

Zynthian is in a nutshell, an open source synthesizer platform. It comes bundled with a set of open source Linux synths, effects, and other audio software. The kit I ordered contains a Raspberry Pi, an RPI sound-card, touchscreen, some audio ports, and encoders. All this is connected via a purpose-built printed circuit board.

I was a bit rusty on my soldering skills so while waiting for the parts to arrive, I practiced a bit on some old hardware salvaged from my parent's farm. I just merely desoldered and soldered components as a way to practice

The actual building was relatively easy, mostly because of the fantastic instructions provided by the Zynthian wiki. I took my time and tried to build it as well as I could.

One of the encoders assembled

The finished PCB which connects everything
The first power on was an exciting moment. As nothing works with the first try, I did not attach all the parts to the enclosure. And as predicted, the first boot was a failure, the touchscreen was not working quite right.


Something wrong with the screen
The first suspect was insufficient or too low a quality power supply. So I tried with the official RPI supply, but it did not help. Then I loaned a Raspberry Pi from work, but still, the screen was all weird. I temporarily used my PC display to verify that everything else was working and indeed the device was perfectly usable. Next up on the list of possibly faulty components was the ribbon cable connecting the display. I replaced that with plain jumper wires but no luck. I concluded that the screen would have to be broken.

I posted about this issue on the Zynthian forums, and within a few hours, a new display was on its way!

While waiting for the screen, I started digging into the software side of things. The Zynthian software is as mentioned open source along with the hardware specifications and proved quite useful when learning how to use the thing. For example, the UI is written in python, and I could read there how the encoders, for example, control the UI navigation. The updating is also pretty nice, there is a script which downloads the latest master from GitHub, compiles and voila, a new version is up and running. Using an own fork of the official software is possible by simply altering the update script repo paths.

I have a couple of ideas on how to make the software work a bit better with the touchscreen, let's see if my thoughts will actualize at some point.

Zynthian setup with a midi keyboard and a PO sequencer




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm not a passionate developer

A family friend of mine is an airlane pilot. A dream job for most, right? As a child, I certainly thought so. Now that I can have grown-up talks with him, I have discovered a more accurate description of his profession. He says that the truth about the job is that it is boring. To me, that is not that surprising. Airplanes are cool and all, but when you are in the middle of the Atlantic sitting next to the colleague you have been talking to past five years, how stimulating can that be? When he says the job is boring, it is not a bad kind of boring. It is a very specific boring. The "boring" you would want as a passenger. Uneventful.  Yet, he loves his job. According to him, an experienced pilot is most pleased when each and every tiny thing in the flight plan - goes according to plan. Passengers in the cabin of an expert pilot sit in the comfort of not even noticing who is flying. As someone employed in a field where being boring is not exactly in high demand, this sounds pro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Canyon Precede:ON 7

I bought or technically leased a Canyon Precede:ON 7 (2022) electric bike last fall. This post is about my experiences with it after riding for about 2000 km this winter. The season was a bit colder than usual, and we had more snow than in years, so I properly put the bike through its paces. I've been cycling for almost 20 years. I've never owned a car nor used public transport regularly. I pedal all distances below 30km in all seasons. Besides commuting, I've mountain biked and raced BMX, and I still actively ride my road bike during the spring and summer months. I've owned a handful of bikes and kept them until their frames failed. Buying new bikes or gear has not been a major part of my hobby, and frankly, I'm quite sceptical about the benefits of updating bikes or gear frequently. I've never owned an E-bike before, but I've rented one a couple of times. The bike arrived in a hilariously large box. I suppose there's no need to worry about damage durin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Extracting object properties from an IFC file with IfcOpenShell

Besides the object geometry information, IFC files may contain properties for the IFC objects. The properties can be, for example, some predefined dimension information such as an object volume or a choice of material. Some of the properties are predefined in the IFC standards, but custom ones can be added. IFC files can be massive and resource-intensive to process, so in some cases, it helps to separate the object properties from the geometry data. IfcOpenShell  is a toolset for processing IFC files. It is written mostly in C++ but also provides a Python interface. To read an IFC file >>> ifc_file = ifcopenshell.open("model.ifc") Fetch all objects of type IfcSlab >>> slab = ifc_file.by_type("IfcSlab")[1] Get the list of properties >>> slab.IsDefinedBy (#145075=IfcRelDefinesByType('2_fok0__fAcBZmMlQcYwie',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145074), #145140=IfcRelDefinesByProperties('3U2LyORgXC2f_hWf6I16C1',#1,$,$,(#27,#59),#145141), #145142...
Post a Comment
Read more