For the last week or so I’ve been looking up ways to build my own synthesizer. One thing led to another, and that led to me discovering and reading up on the Arduino. It’s a sweet micro processor which makes it easy to build circuits and program them on your computer. What really sold it for me, besides all the already amazing features, was that the development IDE was available on all three main OS platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X).

My first circuit with the Arduino

So I just got mine in the mail yesterday and already I’ve fallen in love with it. So much so that I’ve been scrounging around the house for more electronics parts. I opened up an old junk remote and scrapped an LED and a capacitor… an old motherboard gave me a 3.3 miliFarad capacitor (that’s just the start, too). I ordered some more components, such as resistors, an LCD screen, a speaker, more wires, LEDs, etc. from AllElectronics (I used to order 1/4″ -> 1/8″ adaptors from them). The thing is, they probably won’t arrive until Friday when my brother and I will be on a flight to Philadelphia. I won’t even be able to play around much with it until August rolls around.

To the right is a picture of a push button circuit I made with the Arduino (alas, only following an example). Push the button and a light goes on. Look out technology, here I come.