Portable MIDI synth / sequencer module with pi-top[4]

pi-top [4]
#1

Hello all,

Sharing my recent project here: Self-made Portable MIDI synth / sequencer module box which is fun to play with and sounds great.

pi-top[4] is an awesome enclosure for this purpose since it has OLED screen, buttons which can be used to control the ORAC (a great modular synth platform which is also available on Critter & Guitari Organelle) module provided by Patchbox OS (for the realtime kernel and audio software environment), and the mini speaker and the line-out jack which mutes the speaker also serve perfectly for the purpose.

The only thing left is I wish to use my own DAC with the pi-top4 speaker / line-out jack but it can be tricky -I might have to mod my RPI board to remove the audio jack, and wire the audio plug inside the enclosure to my DAC. The internal sound card can only run buffer size 512 / period 3 which is not ideal for serious usage.

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#2

Hi @wangpy, great project! We have a few synth-lovers in pi-top, do you have a github repo for it? It would be good to get a close-up of the OLED screen too on the video, it’s a little difficult to see what’s going on. Awesome work though, this is exciting! :+1:

#3

Hello @duwudi,
Sure for the repo. You can get my latest code here: https://github.com/wangpy/pirate-audio-orac
The code for pi-top is in dev/pi-top4 branch. You can also specify the branch in installer config, as mentioned in README.
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!

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#4

Cool, thanks! I’ll get around to trying it out at some point - keep us updated on any progress :+1: