The Pocket Integrator, explained

The Pocket Integrator is add-on board for Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators that lets you play your drum machine like a drum:

Synchronizing your electronic instruments with live music can be hard. Pocket Integrator makes it easy! It’s an add-on board for Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operator series of hand-held drum machines, that lets you play them like a drum.

Just tap or shake to set the tempo and downbeat of your drum pattern. Keep tapping as long as you like. When you stop, it’ll hold the beat wherever you set it. It’s as easy as clapping your hands!

In the latest Crowd Supply campaign update, Mykle Hansen shares this video which demonstrates who the device works:

The Pocket Integrator, explained

4CHord MIDI

From Sven Gregori on Hackaday.io:

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the USB MIDI keyboard dedicated to play all the four chord songs, from Adele via Green Day and Red Hot Chilli Peppers to U2 and Weezer. Thanks to MIDI, you can be any instrument – and all of them at once. Yay!
 Built around an AVR ATmega328 and Objective Development’s V-USB library, 4chord MIDI acts as a regular USB MIDI instrument. It supports playback in every key and five different playback modes:
  • simple triad chord (root, third, fifth)
  • triad chord + third + fifth + third as quarter notes
  • triad chord + third + fifth + octave as quarter notes
  • root note + third + fifth + third as quarter notes
  • root note + third + fifth + octave as quarter notes

The playback tempo can be set between 60 and 240 bpm.

Here is the board in action:

The design files and source code are available on GitHub:

sgreg/4chord-midi

4CHord MIDI