Designing Winterbloom's Big Honking Button
Winterbloom's Big Honking Button has quickly become my best seller. It's a relatively simple and silly Eurorack module that can also be used as a basic sampler. This post will explore the hardware design of Big Honking Button and discuss the different circuit designs and component selections. It should hopefully be pretty approachable even to electronics newcomers. Also, as a disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer. I still consider myself a hobbyist, and I'm certain I made some mistakes in this design and I might not be completely correct in my analysis and descriptions here. If you notice an error, please feel free to reach out to me and let me know! I'll be happy for the opportunity to learn more.
If you aren't familiar with Eurorack, no worries! Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format- basically, instead of having one big synthesizer you have a bunch of smaller modules and you route signals between them to control how the synthesizer works, and therefore how the synthesizer sounds. Big Honking Button is one of these modules - specifically, Big Honking Button makes sounds that can be manipulated and transformed by other modules.
All of my projects generally start by selecting a development board (like the Arduino Uno or Teensy) that contains the hardware I need to prototype things. Since I will generally incorporate hardware from the development board into the final design, I like to choose boards that are open source and also have the minimum amount of hardware I need.
