Making An ARM Powered MIDI Synthesizer

What you see in the picture above is a hand-made 4-oscillator synthesizer with MIDI input, multi-mode filter and a handful of modulation options. It was built by [Matt], an AVR accustomed electronics enthusiast who made an exception to his habits for this project. The core of the platform is a DIP packaged 32-bit Cortex-M0 ARM processor (LPC1114), stuffed with ‘hand’ written assembly code and compiled C functions. With a 50MHz clock speed, the microcontroller can output samples at 250kHz on the 12bit DAC while being powered by 3 AA batteries.
Making An ARM Powered MIDI Synthesizer
Reading [Matt]‘s write-up, we discover that the firmware he created uses 4 oscillators (sawtooth or pulse shape) together with a low frequency oscillator (triangle, ramp, square, random shapes). It also includes a 2-pole state-variable filter and the ability to adjust the attack-release envelopes (among others). The system takes MIDI commands from a connected device. We embedded videos of his creation in action after the break.


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