Zynthian, the fun synthesizer

Of course I bought the V4 kit immediately, despite it’s more a project for the cold and dark season.

It took the whole eve yesterday to assemble the hardware, despite the fact I luckily had all the tools required available. Unfortunately it didn’t boot. Though the LEDs on the Raspberry PI and the soundcard lit during startup, the screen just left blank. Today I tried the following:

  • Try a new and more powerful power supply, just in case it was to weak to power all the hardware and the screen (as it happened with another Raspberry PI ages ago). This didn’t solve the issue.
  • Recheck the wireing inside the box. Everything appeared to be fine. Reconnecting the cables didn’t solve the issue.
  • Recheck the firmware image used. Heureka. I used »2020-07-27-zynthianos-buster-lite-armhf-1.0.0.zip«, despite the fact the page clearly states that releases labeled as “RC” should be more stable. I downloaded »2020-05-27-zynthianos-buster-lite-1.0.0-RC2.zip«, flashed it using Etcher and the device did start up immediately.

I connected a MIDI keybed and started Aeolus, a pipe organ emulation, on the device. Everything just worked “out of the box”. Phantastic.

I’ll check wether everything works as expected during the next couple of days. For now, I’m extremely content, thanks to the great work of all the people involved.