Open Theremin

Posted: 3/12/2012 2:32:50 AM

From: Sammamish, Washington

Joined: 2/13/2005

I'm curious if any of our readers have tried building the Open Theremin?

What would you think about Theremin World members collaborating on an open theremin design of our own?  We have a lot of really smart people who visit our site daily, and I'm thinking it could be a fun project for us all to work together on something like this.


Posted: 3/12/2012 4:18:53 AM

From: Northern NJ, USA

Joined: 2/17/2012

I think an FPGA or large CPLD (like the Lattice MachXO) might be a better fit than a microprocessor.  Tiny processors tend to be slow and they don't handle real time signals very well.  So everyone turns everything feeding them into slow analog signals, which is a mistake IMO.  I think it's probably better to incorporate the oscillator(s) as much as possible in logic and minimize the analog stuff which is prone to drifting and such.  Make this hybrid oscillator highly sensitive and avoid local oscillator mixing and attendant nonlinearity issues altogether.
