Arduino Retro Synth 1

Backgroud

My dad is really into electronic music, so I decided to make him a synthesizer. I used an arduino uno and a SN76489. The SN76489 is a sound chip that was used in the Sega Master System. It has 3 channels for notes, and 1 channel for noise.

Controlling

To control the sound chip I used a nano. These chips require a certain clock speed, and prviously I used a crystal oscilator. However, they were finicky, and I bought the wrong frequency. I ended up using an arduino nano's built in clock timer for the clock signal. To control the chip I found a library that was made for the SN76489(Arduino TI_SN76489). One issue is there was constantly an annoying d that would never stop playing. To fix trhat I had to manually reset all the channels to stop playing all notes.

Demo

Future

While this project is functional, it is very noisy because it is made on a breadboard. I plan to make a PCB for it(to reduce noise), add MIDI(so it is really a synth), and add potentiometers for volume control.