Build a Hackable Bytebeat Player at the RI Mini Maker Faire

The Rhode Island Mini Maker Faire is this Saturday, featuring dozens of makers alongside the usual music and shenanigans of AS220’s annual Foo Fest. Each year we run a soldering workshop as part of the Faire; this year we’ll be making a hackable bytebeat player from Modern Device, the Byteseeker Junior.

The Byteseeker is an Arduino variant with a headphone jack, two pots and two buttons based on the Real Bare Bones Board. The code we’ll be using at the Faire is kind of like an iPod Shuffle for Bytebeat “songs.” What’s Bytebeat you ask? It’s a genre of 8-bit beatmaking that tweezes complex repeating patterns of sound out of one line math expressions. A more in-depth description may be found in this blog post, but here’s a quick video to give you an idea of what the thing sounds like:

Byteseeker Jr. from Shawn Wallace on Vimeo.

More on Bytebeat and the design details are available on the Byteseeker project page. The soldering workshops run through the afternoon until around 8pm; come on by and build your own Byteseeker kit!