New DIY project - The C19 Databus Drive released!

A new DIY is released - The Databus Drive. :)
It's a massive guitar synthesizer with a 16x16 LED matrix. The goal of this design was to keep it microcontroller free, so it's entirely CMOS based (with the exception of two LED driver chips). It has two signal paths with both octave up, octave down, sawtooth and square waveshapes, and two types of modulation, vibrato and phaser. C19 stands for "CMOS 19" (the number of chips on the board).

The LED matrix was originally developed as an addon for the Multiwave Mega, but I scrapped that idea when the Mega became partially Attiny based, thus uncompatible. The modulation features is also something that I have been wanting to add to an all CMOS based project, but I have always felt that the number of chips required is too high. It's easily done with a single microcontroller, but what's the fun it that?.. :P

All these ideas has come together in the C19 Databus Drive, and what made this feel like a feasible project despite the big number of chips were the idea of a transparent cover, to display all the circuitboard and the LED matrix. I got this idea from the Gigatron TTL computer that I built for myself a while ago (it's a really cool project). But I also love the look of old 8-bit computer motherboards with through hole components, such as the C64.

I had alot of fun putting together this little multitrack demo for the Databus Drive. The drums are from a C64 (with the Mssiah sequencer cartridge) and there's a small addon from a Yamaha PSR-36, but all the other sounds comes from the Databus Drive.

What games and movies that you can spot in the demo? :)

This project is avaliable now!

• PCB avaliable in the webshop.
• Complete DIY kit avaliable from Musikding

Check out this page for more info, documents ect.