Hey guys have you thought about making low budget kit? with just a screen, pi and soundcard maybe? I am currently trying to do this for myself, maybe that could be sth for more people? I am trying to do this for around 120 € atm…
Kr
Fabian
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Yeah, look in https://discourse.zynthian.org/t/success-cases/, there’s plenty of low to high end builds there, the only thing that gets tricky is touchscreens, so look around the forum before you buy those.
With a pi 4 and a janky usb interface i got my first zynthian for around 80 euros, and the case i 3d printed.
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A pi and an hdmi monitor will get you going. You can use the pi 1/4" audio out at minimum. Add a cheap USB audio interface if thats preferred.
There are cheap touchscreens available and I know the pi3 ones will run zynth but the touchscreen is involved but documented. Can’t remember if anyone has done it with a pi4…
I’ve tried getting a pi zero going but didn’t try too hard and didn’t get too many results
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There are many options to build a low cost Zynthian and/or customise it to perfectly suit your requirements. I would be concerned about diluting the support for the official kit of it were complimented by a cheaper option. There currently isn’t much waste or overhead in the official kit which acts as the reference implementation. It provides the physical interface against which the software is designed. Any software / UI customisation must work well on the reference implementation and deviations may prove challenging to support, e.g. touchscreen interfaces to replace encoders. Maybe there is a case for a reference implementation of a reduced physical interface, e.g. just touchscreen and we have tried to reach that many times but there are only a fixed number of hours in a day and limited resources. So, maybe a simpler device is advantageous but it requires further software development before it could be considered a supported implementation.
Btw, my Zynthians are all lower cost self build devices, partly due to an initial desire to minimise cost but subsequently to create a device that best meets my requirements.
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Thanks for all the answers! Yes I will try do something with just a HDMI screen for the beginning - my point was more for the zynthian to sell similar kits semselves so they can benefit from it. but the point makes sense of course that dev time would be needed.
My first steps with the Zynthian platform were using just a spare RPi3B+ & HDMI TV and then a 7" touch screen.
With a bit of mucking around both worked without too much hassle and were enough to convince me of how capable the Zynthian synth was sound wise and and that the kit is actually a pretty ideal form factor. Price wise, Zynthian is about half the cost and much more capable/open than most of the competition on similar RPi based products (eg Norns, Organelle, PiSound, Wavestate, etc)
Best thing of the kit was I can power it by just a cheap 5V USB battery and robust enough to makes it easily portable. The 7" screen while still small is just a bit delicate to transport around and draws a bit too much current to be comfortable on battery.
One trap for young players. The default image has RPi headphones socket disabled which I have only found by accident recently.
Ideally I would like to get Zynthian working on headless on a RPi Zero and Norns/Orac on my Zynthian v4.0 kit/platform now I have some hardware knobs and buttons. There are not many systems that would allow for such things to even approach being possible. Perhaps Korg will bring out Wavestate for Zynthian … :>
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Zynthianers dream big. 
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There is probably a much better case for Korg porting the various open sourced projects to work on their RPi compute & I/O hardware controller platform. You get a Wavestate + Zynthian + Norns + Orac + more :>
Or they can just continue their usual walled garden approach :>
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I guess I should have bet on the walled garden. Looks like the opsix - ALTERED FM SYNTHESIZER might be another RPi compute as it does look remarkably similar to the WaveState. Missed opportunity to add features to an existing product or even bolt them together to be a super keyboard.
I don’t think could have poorly positioned the Nautilus in their product range any better if they tried. Better then a Krome. Not quite as good as a Kronos. All at a price no one will pay :>
I guess the only hope is that this is an indication that the Kronos is about to be surpassed by something amazing … cos I think Korg surely must have run out of things to re-release and call new :>