@alisynthesis Well, I've been doing mostly Eurorack design for around 7 years. I like the idea of smallish portable cases, too, so a lot of my designs have been on the more, ahem, "compact" side. So many tiny knobs.
Last year some friends of mine started Boom Club (
boom-club.org) here in Durham -- one part synth library, one part performance space, one part educational mission.
I put together a few little cases to help get them started, things that were each patchable standalone into a synth voice (so each one had some sort of clock, a sequencer, a VCO, VCF, envelope + VCA or low-pass gate, and a mixer + headphone output).
A couple of weeks after I dropped them off, I got a text from one of my friends saying "how do you patch this case again? I can't remember" and picture of one of those little cases.
That was the seed that stuck in my brain & got me thinking. I was probably on vacation when I started drawing things up.
So, there are a couple of things about this monosynth that I really homed in on: First, all the knobs are really big & generously spaced, and the labels are large and easy to read.
Second: On the one hand, it's not normalled behind the panel at all. Everything has to be manually patched.
But OTOH: Every jack has an LED underneath it. When in "guided patching" mode, it will flash pink lights under pairs of jacks, showing ppl where to patch. Successfully patch one pair, and it goes on to the next pair, until a full patch is done.
There are seven "guided patching" programs, each one designed to help people learn a different analog synthesis concept or technique.
The video I shared earlier was the exponential FM patch. I'm attaching a video of the "massive cross-modulated noise/drone" patch to this post, just for fun.
I also wrote a big (11x17 landscape, to sort of match the scale of the synth) manual, with one two-page spread for each patch.
I can't believe it took nearly a year -- I wasn't working on it every day, or necessarily even every week, but it has definitely been an active work-in-progress that whole time.
A lot of it was engineering problem-solving (e.g. which jacks to use to be able to easily & reliably detect a cable was patched, and then how to fit those jacks into the overall design since they're twice as deep as the jacks I usually use).
I also figured out how to add working switchable rests to the sequencer -- that sequencer is already intended for hands-on playability, and I should probably make a whole post/video about it.
And I rewrote the firmware for my quantizer & solved all the problems I had made for myself in the first version, which was also fun & gratifying.
In fact (and I'm not sure whether I'm psyched about this or just feel like it's inevitable), I suspect the next 3-4 months are going to be me taking a bunch of the design tweaks out of this & putting them back into individual eurorack modules. The VCO in this is really fun & I don't have one like it in eurorack, for example.
#eurorack #synthdiy 
Paul Mietz Egli
Count Buchla
Rich Holmes
zuggamasta
Ross Grady