Comment by Dfiesl

I spent a number of hours building a minidexed from a RPi Zero 2 and parts I already had on hand, and it still doesn't have a proper case. Add 40 buttons, 8 pots and a screen, that's an easy $20-40 worth of parts. Then there's lithium battery and charging curcuits.

Or just buy an FM-1 for $60, most musicians are not hardware hackers.

For the hardware hackers there are hundreds if not thousands of open-source projects. Infinite Digits Zeptocore immediately comes to my mind.

I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.

Yes, musical instruments represent the refinement of technology towards a very specific purpose: the creation of music.

The nature and form of the instrument directs the talents of the musician towards their desired aesthetic. In many ways, the interface informs and sculpts the final product - so instruments which are malleable (software-upgradeable) while providing a canonical haptic experience (hardware control surface) are very appealing to the modern artist.

There is a lot of innovation in the music technology world, vis a vis turning technology into an instrument of sound - but there is also a lot of stagnation, too. Whether its the ancient art of menu-diving as a performance method, or indeed if its the sudden appearance of cocktail devices with whimsy and creativity encoded in the interface, music technology offers a big, wide and often very woolly world in which to apply creative juices.

The M-VAVE is fantastics because it's cheap, it has a somewhat decent user interface layout, haptically, and now .. it is getting serious hacker attention as a boutique/unique thing to play with. Musicians - especially of the technology-aligned variety - absolutely love to one-up each other and excel in distinguishing themselves from standards - of course, musicians also love standards too - the field offers a very broad spectrum of tastes.

Vibe-coding something for the STM32 is indeed a fun thing to do from a music technology perspective - but having it in a fancy case with a battery management PMU, a decent screen with whimsy (and as little menu-diving as possible), and .. interesting sound .. is very, very appealing.

The issue is, music-technology manufacturers often take the shortest possible route to getting their interfaces implemented. Menu-diving is the scourge of music technology - at least until, that is, someone finds a way to incorporate the washing-machine method into a really kickass performance. Think Kraftwerks' reference to the Operator With Their Pocket Calculator, the mundane yet fashionable laptop-on-stage DaDa faction, and compare it to the real rock and roll of guitar and 'tradititional' instruments. The M-VAVE is an expression of the desire of music technology to not only be great (cheap!) but also full of unexplored potential. It is that unexplored potential which motivates the musician, after all ..

(EDIT: there are plenty of examples of music-hacker toys which fulfill your STM32 postulate: the monome, the Zynthian, the insanely great and fertile field of Eurorack modules, many of which did indeed first start off as some hacky STM32 project .. but there are plenty of STM32's which have found their way into a fancy, somewhat expensive case, too .. so seeing M-VAVE pitch into that world is exciting. I literally cannot wait to see what the M-VAVE will have to offer next week ..)