Building a Zynthian Box using an official Kit

1 Introduction

This tutorial is intended for those who are building a Zynthian Box using one of the kits i offer here:

Getting a Zynthian Kit

Anyway, it's quite detailed and can be used as a guide to build your Zynthian Box from scratch. Of course, you will have to be more creative if you want to do it in that way ;-)

2 Some definitions

2.1 Zynthian

It's a project with the goal of creating an Open Synth Platform. It's a community-driven project. If you are here, probably you already know this ;-)

2.2 Zynthian Box

A Zynthian Box is a hardware device designed to run the Zynthian Software. Currently it's based in the Raspberry Pi computer platform.

This is a sketch with the main blocks of a Zynthian Box:

And this is the electric scheme of a Zynthian Box, excluding soundcard and display:

In the project repositories you will find all the electric schemes, PCB specifications, Herber files, etc. to build your own zynthian box from scratch:

Zynthian Hardware Repository
Zynthian Case Repository

2.3 Zynthian Software

The Zynthian Software stack consist of:

* GNU Linux Operating System: Raspbian Jessie (Minibian is used in the last SD images)
* Jack Audio Daemon
* MOD-HOST + MOD-UI software, from ModDevices
* A collection of standalone Synth Engines & LV2 Plugins
* Zynthian User Interface

All the software is Free Software (free as freedom), covered by GPL license or similar.

The easiest way of getting the software is downloading the last "official" SD image from here:

Download Zynthian "Gorgona" SD-image

This SD-image include all the zynthian software, properly configured and ready to use. Plug and play ;-)

After downloading the SD-image, you have to write it to an SD-card. Depending on your OS you have to choose how to create the SD-card. You need a minimum size of 16GB for the full "Gorgona" image and 8GB for the "Gorgonilla" lite image. There is a really good manual for this at https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/installation/installing-images/.

If you prefer, you can build your own SD image following these instructions:

Building the SD Image using the Setup Script

3 The Zynthian Kit

The basic Zynthian Kit is composed of:

* 4 x Controller Modules (rotary encoder + switch)
* 1 x 2in1 Module (GPIO expander + MIDI IN)

[File:4xcontroller_single_kit.jpg