28 October 2009

AVRSynth 32 (Part 1)

Two days ago my oldest daughter had her 9th birthday. And since she is very interested in music, synthesizers and music I decided to give her a special gift. She got her first DIY Synthesizer project. It will become a AVRSynth 32 and it came as a complete kit from Elby Designs in Australia. She is very proud of it. We will build this one together and I will only work on it when she feels like it. But today we already started. First thing we did is see if all the components were present and it looked like some stuff like pot meters and switches are missing. But I also got the front panel components for the ASM-2 so maybe they got mixed up.

We started this nice father-daughter project today with the PCB. It is a digital synthesizer based on a ATMEGA32 8 bit microcontroller running on 16 Mhz. So actually it is a little computer. So the electronics are actually not that complex. We started by mounting the IC sockets and the resistors. Elby has everything nicely bagged and labeled by the way so you don't have to look long for a component of a certain value. My daughter looks up the components and the position it is supposed to go on the PCB and I do the soldering. She sees it like a big puzzle.

Here you can see how far we got today. All the resistors are in place now. She was already tired after this so we decided to stop. I guess we will continue this project soon. The nice thing is that she was very fascinated how the soldering works and I even managed to explain to her how a resistor works. I hope she keeps this enthusiastic about electronics, because I much rather do this kind of stuff with her than play with dolls ;) I'll update you soon on this project again. And now I'm going to count some ASM-2 front panel components.

3 comments:

Araglin said...

Leuk zeg! Ik ben benieuwd naar de vooruitgang! Ennnnuh... over een jaar haar eerste album? ;-)

Synth.nl said...

Hehe.. Album nog niet. Maar ze is wel erg muzikaal. Ze kan ook goed zingen. Dus misschien maken we samen nog wel eens wat muziek ja :)

Anonymous said...

That is cool..... cross-generational synthesizing

Greetings from Austria

Robert