alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I built a synth for my daughter
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This is phenomenal, but my biggest question is (which is probably a more of a long-term one that comes from genuine curiosity/fascination, not doubt): does she use it/enjoy it? I'm so curious to see what happens over time. Does she learn the functions of these buttons, years before having words for what they're doing? Does she write some music? Does she grow up expecting things with knobs to be this interactive/creative? SO cool!
Looks amazing! Reminds me of a funny reddit thread about a man who built a fiber optic star ceiling for his daughter. The top comment was "First child?". :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/8g8pce/fiberoptic_star...
Putting aside the beauty of both the synth and its purpose, what I'm curious about is the learning process in making this. The running theme is that you picked up several new skills 'from cold'. That in itself is impressive enough. How did you approach learning:
- the necessary basic electronics;
- PCB design;
- 3D CAD;
- your particular iterative process,
among other things? I get the impression you built things incrementally, observed what happens and learnt via that feedback loop? Maybe others could share their own feedback loops, too.
Where would you suggest someone starts for building something like this.
What kind of hardware would you suggest (preferably something with Rust!bindings). Is the one used in the original post a good starting point?
I've minimal to no experience with embedded.
What I love about this is how physical it is. So yeah, there's some board running DSP. but the design is amazing. It really relates to some recent posts also in HN about many objects loosing their physical UX. from an age of having buttons and tactical interfaces, everything became more touch based / app based which indeed cut price and allows easier updating. but also lacks some romance which is exactly what this device shows.
> A 3D-printed enclosure is fine for a prototype, but a real product likely needs injection-molded parts, which require expensive tooling.
For kid-friendly toys, yes. But for older users not necessarily:
There's a fun podcast by Arman Bohn/Distropolis (who himself has made some cool small-batch hardware synths) where he interviews makers of small hardware synths, https://open.spotify.com/show/30USGHPeGQ9ZyWQDyRnfcv might be of interest.
It's not kid friendly, but in case anybody's interested I just wrote up how I made a simple "hardware" synth by bodging together a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and I2S audio module, total cost around £10 on Amazon UK.
The hardware's very cheap and easy. The "default" synthesis is pretty simple but also pretty hackable (in Rust) if you want to customize it.
Amazing the things we do for our little ones. I built a toddler-friendly keyboard for my son. He's still playing some form of piano 6 years later, no longer with his fists or feet.
Reminds me of the work of Love Hultén: https://www.lovehulten.com
He builds beautiful, colorful, retro-futuristic audio-visual art pieces Many are synths.
Hmm, very cool project and maybe just the inspiration I need.
I bought a Baby Einstein Magic Touch Guitar for a friend’s daughter a couple of years ago, and while it was okay as a toy, it was disappointing as a musical instrument because the chords it plays are badly chosen. It’s basically impossible to play along with most songs.
I’ve had the back burnered idea to buy another and improve it; maybe I will now, following a variation on your approach.
Would love something like this for my daughter, but with a max volume option she can't tamper with LOL
If I have zero experience designing PCBs but wanted to do a similarly (non)-complex one, how much of a tall order would that be? In my completely made-up mental model, I'm guessing I just take the parts I've already breadboarded, look them up in some sidebar, and drag and drop them around, snapping to nice clean spacing, and then connect all the various pins together and have it automatically organize things? We're not going for perfect here. Just "Baby's first PCB" that at least works.
And then when I have one designed, how much would it cost to get made and sent to me if I was okay if it took a month?
But most importantly: how do I build personal confidence that I'm not shipping a potato off to be printed? Is there a community I could ask for a review from?
I've been learning CAD, 3d printing, PCB design and brushing up on my embedded programming... all with the goal of being able to build toys for/with my son. It's incredible how accessible it is in todays world, made possible by these advancements:
- incredibly powerful and cheap microprocessors (esp-32) - Fast, high precision desktop 3d printers - Affordable small batch PCB manufacturing - LLM's to advise on circuit design and help with embedded programming
Would you have any interest selling a non-comm license to the PCB, f3d files and source code? My 1.5yo son would absolutely love this!
Great finish. I was busy designing and soldering the prototype synthesizer during the summer, but I had to put it on hold because my baby was born in September.
I had the same problem back then: injection molding is quite expensive to start. But you could consider a more creative approach: using a PCB directly as the panel, such as a TE's Pocket Operator. Korg also has this solution for some educational products. Alternatively, you could use 3D printing; there are many inexpensive services in China. CNC doesn't have the mold-making issue, but it's more expensive and doesn't seem suitable for children.
Another interesting point: after my child was born, I didn't have much time for my sound work. But recently, I was surprised to find that I spend most of my time playing white noise on Glicol (http://glicol.org/) and it works great for my kid.
``` o: noise 42 >> lpf ~mod 1 >> mul ~mod3
~mod: sin ~mod2 >> mul 200 >> add 1000
~mod2: sin 0.1 >> mul 0.04 >> add 0.1
~mod3: sin 0.04 >> mul 0.3 >> add 0.8 ```
Good luck with kickstarter!
What an awesome project. It looks fabulous!
Reminds me of the Dato Duo I have.
The "Dato Duo" is also a synth aimed at kids. It allows 2 kids to play together. it is made by a Dutch company called Dato (https://dato.mu). Their latest musical invention the "Dato Drum" had a successful Kickstarter and is shipping now. This drum machine allows even more kids to play together.
PS: As the owner of a Dato Duo I can share you a little secret: it's also fun for adults :)
The traditional approach is you give noisemaking toys to your niblings, not your own children.
What a beautiful and charming project. Kudos for taking it all the way from zero to one with such a polished design. That's no small feat. I've built prototypes for eurorack and even with some simplifying constraints it's a lot of work.
Best of luck with your Kickstarter!
Ahh, this made me think of "Dato DUO", similar concept (though the Dato stuff is a little more complex): https://dato.mu/
Looks like a fun project. I can highly recommend Teensy Audio Library for audio projects: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/td_libs_Audio.html
Cool! Reminds of the Music From Outer Space synth in which the designer makes the claim that it "can actually get a child away from a television" and includes a video to prove it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6M_KrZByz4
MFOS Weird Sound Generator
https://musicfromouterspace.com/index.php?CATPARTNO=WSG001&P...
Were you aware of the Dato Duo (https://dato.mu/)? It's very cool for kids, except for the fairly steep price point.
The advantage is that it's limited, so it greatly reduces the wall of difficulty to manage to get some 'nice-sounding' music (mostly the restriction to the pentatonic scale). However, kids still manage to find the most horrible-sounding settings, and insist on keeping them as is...
This is such a good idea!
Kids music toys are often just purely toys tap a button, make a sound... But the skill ceiling could be so much higher, offering the ability to learn and express themselves more. Awesome work.
This is absolutely FANTASTIC, and I am humbled by your mad skillz!
My son and I are also fascinated by the sweet, sweet synth sound, but as I have no discernible talent, we went this route:
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Nts1Mk2--korg-nutekt...
Which, unfortunately, has a HUGE learning curve in terms of operation.
Wow! Very cool. How hard would it be to create a "custom" sound, where you use the sliders to adjust the Attack Decay Sustain and Release?
Your daughter is so lucky! I meaning the physical UX is very reminiscent of teenage engineering, looks great! The more I was scrolling down the article the more I hoped for an « order » button :)
that's great! may your daughter make great use of it!
love the fact that your step sequencer even has a display to tell you what note you are adjusting to and from. i've always found that tuning synths and sequencers both analog and digital can be a pain because you can forget the note (or you don't have a good set of ears or perfect pitch) even if the result sounds good.
I was too fascinated by the different thumb nail lengths to concentrate much on the video.
This is great. I’m going to start making something like this, but with some cut apple wood knobs, for my birds.
Wow! Looks great and very inspiring. Great idea to make separate components that can be connected - something like a drum machine, sequencer, maybe even a chord synthesizer? It can be constrained such that you are always diatonic, you could have a mode knob too.
Jamming with other people can be a life changing experience, and to do that as a child would be a great privilege to have.
Looks so nice! The sam is a midi synth chip right? Super cool. How/where did you get the knobs?
This is an inspiring project! I would love to see more stuff like this and updates if you decide to evolve the project further.
I love the atmosphere, the object and the purpose.
Wow, what an amazing demo for such a simple synth. Great work! If you ever start a Kickstarter, I’d be happy to donate. If it inspires some kid out there to get into music production, it’s a win for me :)
This is great. I did a similar thing when my kids were young (revived an old, dead Kawai synth with a Raspberry Pi and sound fonts), but doing it with semi-discrete circuits seems a lot more fun.
Kinda funny but my adult son has taken an interest in guitars and keyboard and that has me working on MIDI routers with AVR-8 and building an ESP32 based synth module.
This is fantastic, as a hardware synth lover and a dad you’re making me pretty jealous.
What an incredible idea, I with every nursery to school had some of these!
As someone who has never 3d printed anything, I'm surprised by how clean the case looks as opposed to what we usually see. Why is it so smooth?
This is awesome. I had vibecoded something similar called https://chippytune.com for myself. Still working on wav support though
Makes me wonder what the difference, in definition, is between a sequencer and a synthesizer? Is this really a synthesizer, or is it really a sequencer?
Yes, I'm splitting hairs about semantics.
This is awesome. Just awesome. Love that it looks like a baby toy and packs enough punch to get a kid about 20 years up the line of music understanding.
Regarding case material for productizing, you could consider a combination of plywood and bent sheet metal, eg like a Moog. Also check out dato.mu for a few examples of kid proof synth enclosures.
Very cool. Reminds me of things like the Blipbox myTRACKS and the CHOMPI.
Really cool project, super polished. The panda animation!
I'm a 44 year old man and I would love this - for years I've tried to dabble with music with much lack of success - but this looks really fun to play with. Great job.
Reminds me of the concept of the Data DUO, very inspiring
Totally rad! Makes me think about what kind of simple programming could be possible with a minimal HCI like this.
Thanks for all the kind words and feedback. There are some comments expressing interest in supporting a Kickstarter etc. If you're interested in receiving updates you can leave your email here:
https://tally.so/r/Y55dXv
Thanks again - this was a bit of a surprise!