Vintage '80s Electronic Toy Becomes Modern Synthesizer

If you follow Adafruit on social media (and you should), then you've seen that they like to collect vintage electronic devices of all kinds. Due to the rapid advancement of technology, devices quickly become obsolete and end up in landfills before they reach vintage status. That's a shame, which is why we appreciate that Adafruit preserves some of them. One interesting recent acquisition was a Computer Perfection electronic game, which has a very distinct and alluring design. Its functionality is completely pointless in the today's world, so John Park converted it into a modern synthesizer.

Computer Perfection was an electronic memory game in an enclosure that looked futuristic when it hit the market. Opening the translucent, hemispherical hood would reveal 10 large buttons, each with a corresponding symbol and LED. Gameplay worked a lot like those electronic Simon games: the LEDs would illuminate in a sequence and players would have to remember the sequence to reproduce it by pressing the buttons. Each round increases the number of moves in the sequence. Mess up the order and you lose.

Today, you could find a million apps for your iPad or smartphone that provide similar challenges. But the design of the Computer Perfection unit was too cool to pass up. And because it has several buttons, Park decided it would make a good synthesizer. He just needed the hardware to make that happen and, as luck would have it, Adafruit makes suitable hardware and just released a synthesizer library for it.

The most important new component was an Adafruit Metro M7 development board that runs the new synthio CircuitPython library. That outputs sound to a small 3W speaker through an Adafruit I2S 3W Cladd D amplifier module. Other components included a strip of NeoPixel LEDs, a prototyping shield, and a 28-pin DIP connector.

That DIP connector was important. It lets makers easily connect wires to a DIP socket that would normally accept an IC (Integrated Circuit) chip. By using that, Park was able to repurpose the Computer Perfection's original PCB. That PCB is very simple and only contained a chip in the socket, switches, LEDs, resistors, and button contact pads. Park used the DIP connector to interface the new hardware with the original PCB, making wiring very straightforward.

From there, it was just a matter of cramming the new hardware into the Computer Perfection enclosure (which had plenty of room) and setting up the synthio library. Now pushing the buttons triggers the synthesis of musical notes.