Appendix N
The Eurorack module design community is a pretty small niche, and even fewer people are posting resources about designing modules with digital microprocessors. Here are a few resources that I have found useful when working on modules:
YouTube
- Look Mum No Computer. Sam is a musician who makes almost all his own modules for his synthesizer. Many of the schematics for these modules are available on his website. His modules are not Eurorack (they are his own format which he calls Kosmo), but they are close enough that you could probably adapt them.
- Moritz Klein is another great YouTube channel that takes you through the process of designing analog modules from scratch.
- Aaron Lanterman teaches a class on Analog Circuits for Music Synthesis at Georgia Tech, and the lectures are all available online.
- MeeBilt has a collection of modules with original PCB designs.
- Benjie Jiao is another YouTube channel with a mix of original and adapted designs
Analog module designs
- Dintree is a small collection of DIY schematics for simple, analog utility modules.
- Skull & Circuits has the schematics for all their modules available online.
- Kosmodular Grid has a bunch of modules for the Kosmo fromat (including those designed by LMNC and others) and they are mostly open source/DIY.
- Music From Outer Space is an archive of the work of the late Ray Wilson – a titan in the early days of DIY modular synths.
- Yusynth seems to have a lot of amazing designs for oldschool 5U modules. The website is largely inscrutable to me, but some day I plan to try to decipher it and maybe translate some of the modules into Eurorack.
Open-source digital modules
- Mutable Instruments is one of the biggest commercial Eurorack manufacturers, but Émilie Gillet makes all the code and hardware for their modules open source. These are not primarily intended as a learning resource, but having access to any open source modules as a reference was extremely helpful for me.
- Music Thing Modular is another module manufacturer that open-sources all their modules. It’s hard to understate how helpful it its to see the way real commercial modules are built to give yourself confidence that what you are doing is ok. My RNG module is also directly inspired by the MTM Turing Machine (in function, at least, if not in design).
- Winterbloom open sources their modules, which are made with Circuit Python. A large part of their mission is education.
- Ornament & Crime is an open-source Eurorack module that has spawned its own community of firmware hacking.
Other resources
- Otto’s DIY makes the power adapters I use for development. They also have a few Arduino-based (and non-arduino) “recipes” although I haven’t actually looked at them.
- Electro Smith’s Daisy project is a microcontroller board designed specifically for Eurorack. They sell a pre-built generic module for prototyping and a daughter board that can be used to make custom digital modules.
- DU-INO is a Detroit Underground module that can be controlled by an Arduino. I haven’t played with one but for someone who wants to start making modules with an Arduino without any soldering, it might be a good place to start.
- Cascadence is an Arduino-compatible multi-function programmable Eurorack module. It is open source but discontinued and very poorly documented.
- r/modular and r/synthdiy for help with DIY assembly questions and other information.