Deep Dive: Zoxnoxious analog synth

Development
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I’m starting a couple deep dive video on the Zoxnoxious synth and thought I’d put that in a thread here instead of the demo thread, since it’s intended to be more on the dev/tech side. Some of the deep dive is for documenting to my future self “oh that’s how it works”.

This first video is towards project background and goes over the frontend and how the modules interact. It covers the VCV Rack modules and how they are used to get stuff out to USB. The next video will be picking up from the far side of a USB cable where a Raspberry Pi talks to the hardware. Hope you get something out of it…besides falling asleep to my monotone voice.

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Impressive project!

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Wrapped up Part Two deep dive on the Zoxnoxious analog synth. This is less synth/VCV Rack focused than the first video, focusing on the Raspberry Pi’s gadget mode and how it provides MIDI and 54 channels of audio that are used for control voltages coming from Rack. I think the really cool part is the example USB setup can be done with a Raspberry Pi alone, no Zoxnoxious hardware necessary to get Rack signals to the Pi. Maybe that’ll spark some ideas that others have in using a Pi? The video shows the signals leaving the host computer running Rack, roundtrip to the Pi and back to Rack.

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Great, geeky stuff!

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Calling it great & geeky may be the highest compliment! I’m thinking to wrap up the series with a third video to really bite into the hardware, it’d target a more narrowed audience. Tentative content: the signal bus between voice cards, voice card components, and VCO/VCF autotune. Pretty low level, but seems that level of detail is justified after the first two videos. Do let me know if there is anything you think would be interesting to cover.

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Here’s the third video in the Zoxnoxious deep dive series. This one really gets into the signals that get passed to the voice cards for communication. I show how protocols such as SPI & I2C are used by the synth and tie it back to the VCV Rack frontend. It’s pretty deep on the hardware side, which wraps things up after the first two videos covered the frontend and USB MIDI & Audio interfaces. Also covered is how autotune works for calibration. This is how the analog VCOs and VCFs stay in tune.

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