Rundgang 2025

This year's Rundang is all about music electronics. Our fourth semester had the challenging task to come up with a concept of a working musical device. The seconds semester had to build self playing musical sound devices.

For my course "Digital Prototyping" I designed a custom audio pcb based on the RP2350 from Raspberry Pi. It featured buttons and a magnetic encoder as inputs and an led grid and some status leds as visual outputs. Audio was stereo in and stereo out and it also featured two CV inputs and outputs. The course was held as a cooperation with Prof. Janina Schmidt and her course 4D Design. Janina layed the theoretical groundwork and I supervised the practical project.

The students were tasked with developing an audio device. They could choose from 5 different types of devices which were drum machine, sequencer, effect device, oscillator and filter. They had to use the magnetic encoder as main input and had to come up with a user flow and flow chart for the interaction design. They also had to design the cases, buttons and rotary encoder knob in CAD and manufacture them. Firmware samples (made mostly with AI) were also part of their project. In the end I pieced everything together into 5 working firmwares with audio.

Everything went really well and we ended up with 5 working types of devices and 25 devices in total. All students were super engaged in the course and it was really amazing!

Our second semester course "Design Coding 2" went into the territory of creating custom musical instruments. The instruments were controlled by microcontrollers that were programmed in Arduino. We used the Raspberry Pi Pico as a very versatile, reliable and affordable central computing unit.

Thanks to all students and helpers! It was a very good Rundgang and I really enjoyed it.