I recently got a Groovesizer TB2, and since it has a certain chiptune-ish feeling to it, I decided to write about it here.
The TB2 is basically a shield for the Arduino Due, which turns it into a small polyphonic synthesizer. The cool features of it are: 4 note polyphony, mini-keyboard directly on the board, supports single-cycle waveforms. The last one is the actual killer features.
The TB2 also has a nice built-in sequencer, which supports multiple patterns and on-the-fly quantised triggering.
As mentioned before, I think it has a certain chiptune-ish style. First of all because of the sound, which has a nice lo-fi digital quality and the support for single-cycle waveforms (which remind me of old-school trackers). But it's not just that, the fact that it almost let's you create complete songs directly on the device with the built in sequencer and the inherent limitations of the interface and software are also characteristics often found in chiptune hardware.
Here's a demo of the thing in action:
The firmware is still under development, but the current version is already pretty usable. Since it's just a shield for the open Arduino platform it's a great thing to hack and mod.
Last edited by rumpelfilter (Dec 29, 2014 8:48 am)