an 8 voice touch synth - https://plinkysynth.com
Plinky started life as a hobby project that spiralled out of control, was sold for a while on Thonk as a kit, went out of stock during the post-covid chip shortage, and was then rescued by various wonderful people in the Plinky community. Alogn the way, it got open sourced - both hardware and software. You are in the right place for that!
You can see that the software has largely been stagnant since original release; however in early 2025, a hero by the name of RJ stepped up and contributed some incredible improvements, rewriting large parts of the Sequencer and MIDI implementation. Plinky as of version 0.B0 (to be released shortly at the time of writing) is going to be by far the best version of plinky Ever, by far. HUGE thanks to RJ for really pushing plinky closer to its full potential.
If you want to get in on the action, join the Plinky Discord (see details at plinkysynth.com and check out the #beta-firwmare channel) or check out the sw/ folder here. Special shout out to @whocano in that channel who beta-tested the new fixes from RJ. See, plinky is a team effort? It is truly a special community. Thankyou from the bottom of my heart.
But plinky is not just software; It's a physical thing!
Many thanks to the people who worked so hard to make opensource plinky a reality, far better than the original version (V1) and (V2) that I stumbled through creating. V3 was a product of the Plinky Discord community, especially:
- Stijn from This Is Not Rocket Science routed the original Version 3.
- Steve / Okyreon from denki oto added the LPZW midi circuit to allow plinky to have on-board midi without the expander.
- Kay from LPZW Modules then contributed a circuit to fix the input noise, and then polished everything into a 'Version 3.1', which is the current version linked here. Kay also was one of the original people who helped me with the hardware design of V1 and V2.
If you contributed to the open source hardware and I forgot you, please shout at me @mmalex on the Plinky Discord. Thanks to all the Plinky Discord members for making Plinky ever better!
Although this repo is all about the OSS Plinky, it is, as ever, available from Thonk in both prebuilt and kit form, and from other retailers including Schneidersladen. Thanks to MakingSoundMachines and LPZW Modules for manufacturing those for people who are not looking for the full OSS experience :)
For posterity, here is what I wrote at Stijn's coffee table as I released plinky into the public, not knowing what would become of it....
I apologise, its been so long since I looked at this, I am releasing a snapshot of what I had on my harddrive after a couple of years of barely being touched. while I am not actively developing plinky, I hope that by open sourcing it I can stimulate the wonderful community who collaborate on the plinky discord. I also hope to help iterate on some of the more obvious bugs, both hardware and software.
If you are interested in plinky, please feel free to join our discord community. More information at https://plinkysynth.com
Please refer to the license for information including stuff about derived works.
please see CONTRIBUTING.md for information on contributing to this project.
UPDATE Jan 2025 it is now possible to build and debug plinky using the arm-cortex-debug extension in VSCode. notes continue below:
you need STM32 cube ide, its basically the default project so most of the code is in /sw/Core/Src, most of the rest of the /sw folder is just the usual auto generated boilerplate mess.
It would be a useful project to update the firmware to build with a more minimal setup; the only significant middleware used relates to USB; while I lean on the STM default project a little, I imagine that the peripheral code could be modified fairly easily.
it should also compile as an emulator for mac and windows, using portaudio and dear imgui. it also compiles for wasm, somehow... I imagine that following the path of the WASM emulator, it would be relatively easy to port plinky to software plugin type platforms.
there is also a bootloader project... I forget exactly how it relates to the final build process. Consider that a TODO to document :)
the hardware is mostly in the hw/ folder, but I was new to kicad so I am not sure if all the library stuff is in the right place.
if there is something missing or something in there that you think shouldn't be in there, let me know and I can sort it out
Many thanks to the plinky community, who have helped plinky evolve and kept the dream alive over a few years.
- Thanks to Steve from https://thonk.co.uk who encouraged plinky into existence and helped produce the kits;
- to Kay from https://leipzigwest.org/ for tireless hardware help, encouragment and pre-made plinkys!
- To Stijn from http://www2.thisisnotrocketscience.nl/ for support, hardware help, and the impetus to opensource this.
- To MakingSoundMachines from https://makingsoundmachines.com/ for carrying the torch for the new Thonk kits and prebuilt versions, as well as representing Plinky at shows such as Superbooth.
- to RJ for the incredible bugfixes and rewrites in the firmware that make plinky actually usable as a midi device and touch sequencer. <3
- to Okyeron for V3 hardware work
- to Miunau for the plinky website and continual encouragement, and the original wavetables
- to Meska, LPZW and Grain Blanc for preset packs
- to CrazyEmperor893, SwampFlux, ld, orangetronic, Zifor, tubbutec and many others on the plinky discord for keeping plinky alive and well while I was away.
- to all the people I have missed out, I have a terrible memory, please shout at me if you can see anyone missing from this list who deserves to be here.
Cheers all!
-- mmalex