u/Jolly-Confidence9953

I'm a high school student on my school's robotics team. My school was about to throw out a pile of old electronic parts, so I convinced my teacher to let me rescue the ICs instead of letting them get binned or sit in a closet.

The result is a 3-voice synth using 555 timers as the oscillators, controlled via two joysticks and a 4x4 keypad through an Arduino Uno. For envelope shaping (tremolo, attack/decay) I built my own vactrols rather than buying commercial ones, which was the part I learned the most from.

This is my first project touching audio/music electronics, so I'm treating it as a proof-of-concept / v1. I already have ideas for a v2 but it'll need a rebuild from scratch, so I documented this version before tearing it down.

Full schematics and code here: https://github.com/W10SE/555-Synth-V1

I am a high school student, and my school was recently about to throw away a ton of old electronic parts. Because I am on the school robotics team, I managed to convince my teacher to let me rescue a lot of the old ICs for my own use instead of letting them either get thrown away or sit in the closet and collect dust.

I used some vactrols here that I made myself to shape the audio and add a tremolo and attack/decay. This is my first time working with anything close to music so I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Now this is more of a proof of concept. Actually this is version 1 of the project, I intend to add a bit more when I can. But for that I would have to rebuild it from scratch , so I decided might as well post it .

I made a repository for it as well. Here it is : https://github.com/W10SE/555-Synth-V1 . If you want to check it in more details. If you have any ideas I could add to this, I would love to hear it.