Explore the board
Welcome to Synthia's anatomy guide!
Whether you have already assembled your Synthia or not, this is going to be a helpful guide where you’ll learn a bit more about the soldered components, small connections, and drivers.
We'll start with bigger components and cover smaller components later in the guide.
Exploring the board
Starting with anything else but the PCB board itself would be wrong. Therefore, we present you the star of the night...
PCB stands for a printed circuit board. This fiberglass board has copper traces, protective paint, and insulating material.
PCB stands for a printed circuit board. This fiberglass board has copper traces, protective paint, and insulating material.
Thanks to all the copper lead on the board, all the connected or soldered components can communicate with each other.
Due to its complexity and sensitivity, this module is already connected to Synthia's main board.
Just like with other CircuitMess devices like Nibble or Spencer, we want our components not only to work wonders but to look cool as well! Therefore, we designed some pretty fun patterns you can see on the back of the board.
ESP-WROOM-32
This microcontroller runs everything, and you could say that this is Synthia's brain. ESP-WROOM-32 is a powerful module mainly used for sound encoding and streaming music. It is reasonably priced considering all its abilities.
Apart from being famous for sound encoding, ESP-WROOM-32 also controls sliders, encoders, pushbuttons, and LEDs.
Due to its complexity and sensitivity, this module is already connected to Synthia's main board.
Reset button
This one’s pretty self-explanatory - the reset button is used for resetting the whole device. You can find this useful in case something gets frozen (which is hopefully never).
We use RGB lights under the pushbuttons and at the edges of the LED matrix (the darker ones). All of the other LEDs are regular white LEDs.
USB-C connector
This connector on the top left side of the board is used for connecting Synthia to the computer. Once you connect it to your PC, you’ll be able to program it in CircuitBlocks - a graphical programming interface that helps newbies get into embedded programming.
Also, you need to connect it with the PC in order to use it or to do a hardware test.
Headphone jack
This is a headphone jack for standard headphones/earphones.
Sorry - no wireless headphones here!
There is a headphone jack that’s soldered to the upper left side of the board.
Once you start mixing music on your Synthia, you can plug in the headphones, and the sound will automatically transfer from the speakers to the headphones.
Once you start mixing music on your Synthia, you can plug in the headphones, and the sound will automatically transfer from the speakers to the headphones.
LED lights
Have a wild guess - how many LEDs are there on the board?
These LED lights are one of the most exciting components on Synthia's board.
There are two types of LEDs on Synthia's PCB - the RGB and the regular white ones.
There are two types of LEDs on Synthia's PCB - the RGB and the regular white ones.
We use RGB lights under the pushbuttons and at the edges of the LED matrix (the darker ones). All of the other LEDs are regular white LEDs.
SPH microphone
The SPH is a miniature, high-performance, low-power, bottom port silicon digital microphone.
Speaker
As you all probably already know, you'll use the speaker to listen to cool tracks you make.
Speaker connector
Out of all of the components, only the speaker connector is located on the back side of the PCB.
This connector is used for manually connecting the speaker to the main board.
