MonoMiK - Analog meets digital

Published on Mar 19, 2015 Michael Kukat

"It's been a while since my last video, especially since my last video about the MonoMiK. This monster project was boxed for several years and didn't see power because i was busy writing an operating system for it and didn't have lots of spare time in general.

Okay, i also got distracted with other stuff that i can do with this operating system like SD card to SCSI adapters, MFM to USB bridges and some other crazy shit :)

But finally, the basic bits are there and i decided to switch back to this project. Working on it since several weekends, today was the moment to put the new digital control part together with the existing analog synth stuff.

The MonoMiK is a real analog synthesizer, just the control part is digital. So you have all those knobs for changing the parameters, they don't go through the CPU, they are directly connected to the synth modules. But you can still store them by some tricky override mechanism. At least this is planned.

To avoid tons of switches for waveform selection and configuration of the routing matrix, there is a touch screen with a GUI where those controls go. And here, you see the first test of how those things work together. It's the prototype of what will get a PCB during the next weeks.

Using circular DMA and some fancy tricks on the STM32F207, this generates 80 analog control voltages without using any CPU power, i plan to control oscillator synchronization using the STM32 timers also, which allows very fancy features for this synchronization, there is a lot more to come.

I hope you don't need to wait too long for the next part. Just wanted to say i'm back :)"

I created a new MonoMiK channel label for these moving forward. A quick search on MonoMiK will bring up previous posts.