What have we been up to?

People asked us if we were still working on Nerdsynth. People pleaded us to “plz build thz..” or told us “u muzt make it or elz..”.

So we guessed a little heads up was long overdue. And a little heads up is exactly what you’re going to be getting today.

Anyway, here’s what we’ve been up to.

We started of with this idea of building the hardware tool that WE would be most happy with. We had a few ideas of what we were looking for during live sets of our own and decided to try and make it so.

In short, our list of features included (and still include):

• We want one machine to rule them all
• We want a machine that both belongs (and works well) in a studio and belongs (and works well) on stage
• We want to create music in a “tracker style” interface
• We want the Nerdsynth to be assemblable (is that even a word?) by hand, by anyone. So no hard to solder parts, no difficult to reach stuff, etc.
• We want to create our own sound chip to use with the Nerdsynth
• We want to connect other sound chips (via sound chip shields)

We choose a microcontroller we wanted to use as a sound chip, built a prototyping board for it, got some code running and that’s basically when you never heard from us again…until now.

We have been thinking about the Nerdsynth A LOT. We have many good ideas that we want to implement, we have ordered some parts to see if the things we want to do are feasible (sadly, the fullscreen HD porn didn’t make the “doable”-list) and we want to start devoting a bit more time to developing and testing stuff.

To give ourselves a bit of an incentive to keep on working hard and to keep you guys up to date, we decided to start this blog and post on a semi-regular basis what we’re up to.

At the moment, Thomas is working on code to make a touchscreen display do what we want and Jan is preparing himself to make some PCB’s for a prototyping board that will allow us to develop code for the main microcontroller (which runs the GUI and the sequencer) and the sound chips.

Please drop by regularly to check up on us, don’t hesitate to comment and tell us what you think about the Nerdsynth and most importantly: drink beer.

Talk soon, Jan and Thomas!