roto icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
roto copied to clipboard

Embedded tonewheel organ synthesizer for a Teensy

roto

Roto is an embedded MIDI synthesizer that mimics a Hammond B3 organ. It's designed to run on a Teensy development board, with a Teensy audio board as output.

As of July 2018, it's in the early stages of development. I'll be presenting it at Strange Loop 2018 in Soul from Scratch: Designing a More Portable Organ

It currently requires a Teensy 3.6 (180MHz), though I would like to target the Teensy 3.2 (72MHz) once its CPU requirements are understood.

Block Diagram

Here's where things are headed:

roto design

Getting Started

You will need:

  • Teensy 3.6
  • Teensy audio board

Building

First, install the Arduino IDE and Teensyduino as described in the Teensy Tutorial.

Roto installs and builds like any Arduino sketch. Make sure you select "USB Type: Serial + MIDI" when uploading.

Using

Roto responds to key down & up events over USB-MIDI.

Testing

Roto has an offline test suite that can be run with make test.