Welcome to the Organon Biodata Sonification system for Eurorack Synthesizer. This device connects to the leaves of a plant and generates musical notes through 3 Gate/Pitch Outputs, a PWM ‘raw’ Biodata output, a ‘wiggly’ CV out, and MIDI via 3.5mm Type-A jack. The top of the module features AE Modular style pin patching bay which duplicates the 3.5mm output jacks.
I have always wanted to bring my Biodata MIDI device into Eurorack and, partnering with my friend thomblane.com for faceplate art, I designed a nice little module using an Arduino ProMicro 32u4 as a brain and the MCP4728 Quad DAC for CV outputs. The design was intended to be used in either Eurorack or AEModular formats, but the AE module depth is a bit too tight! With the pandemic and chip shortage, this device took about 2 years to actually build, DACs were totally unavailable and I needed to scour the internet for LMC555 timers for my other Biodata designs. One large challenge with building Biodata systems has been to provide proper electrical isolation for the sensor circuit to have the highest sensitivity.
The Knob, labeled ‘Bloom’, increases the device’s sensitivity when turned clockwise. The Button does not do anything on this version of the codebase, originally I had some menu modes related Note Scaling and MIDI, but these features were removed for simplicity.
Warning – don’t go plugging strange things into the ‘Matter’ electrode input jack please 😉
Only 12 of the Organon have been produced, including two prototypes sent to Thom for testing. The build is a bit too challenging to release as a kit or for me to produce additional modules.
Open Source design files can be found on GitHub
