alt Hacker NewsPutting 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.
I've been reflecting on this a bit. I found it very useful to have a well-defined project and focus the learning time on things that are necessary for completing it. Having a background in coding was useful because I find you end up developing a knack for isolating parts of systems and figuring out how to work on small parts that end up fitting together.
I therefore focused initially on simply getting readings from a single potentiometer; if I could do that then I felt pretty confident I could read from four of them. If I could generate a midi message I was pretty confident I could send it to something that could read it etc.
When I started on the PCB design I had a simple circuit already so it was a case of translating that onto a board.
I didn't get too deep into any of the various parts but I found that it gave me a birds-eye view of the whole process and I now feel confident in isolating parts of them and 'zooming in' to them and refining them, building on the foundation I've developed.