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Professional engineer. Unprofessional tinkerer.

Hobby projects and experiments, built outside of work.

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Metacortex Drum Synth
20 March 2026

MIDI controller interface.

I've really been trying to up my game with industrial PCB design and this was a brill opportunity to create something that's never been seen before.

The motherboard has all sorts of goodies such as an ESP32-S3 for synth programming, alongside I2S Audio Amp, headphone and speaker out, a cute little tonal buzzer amongst noise filters and other things.

The interface is the star of the show however, using capacitive touch way of a BS8116A-3 directly to exposed tracks within my little icon design! Then other parts of the icons are exposed down through to the FR4 board, which happens to be semi-transparent so the cheeky little side-oriented addressable RGB LEDs (and glue gun globs) on the underside shine light through to the front! It's not perfect but worked waaay better than I expected, and ended up as something useful and wholly unique.

It makes for a perfect drum sequencer or synth.