A groovebox with
a bandmate inside.
Sixteen pads, sixteen rings, a ten-inch screen, real jacks — and an agent that plays in musical time, on the same hands you do. Scroll to take it apart. Drag to orbit any time.
Every printed part fits a Ø200 mm bed. The model regenerates from cad/instrument/; the electronics are stand-ins dimensioned from datasheets where they exist and marked as estimates where they don't.
Aluminium bones,
two layers of skin.
Nothing MPC-sized fits a 200 mm printer, so the body is a frame: 2020 extrusion rails joined by four printed pillars, with every panel a separate print. The panels wear the same skin as the speakers: big Voronoi cells carved into the outer face, smaller cells nested inside each one and cut straight through. You see the boards through the small cells, framed by the big ones, because hiding them would be a lie.
Nine rails, four pillars, nineteen unique prints. Each panel gets its own seed; no two alike. Same generator as the speaker shells, flattened.
Sixteen pads,
one print.
4×4 at 40 mm pitch is a 160 mm square, so the whole deck is one piece: a through-cut per pad and an RGB well under each, lit from the sensor board below. Velocity and pressure come from interleaved traces under conductive silicone — the hardest mechanical part of the whole thing, which is why we prototype three.
When the agent plays a pad, the pad lights. Ghost hands, rule one: if it touched it, you saw it.
Sixteen rings you
can watch move.
Each encoder wears an LED ring. When the agent reaches for the filter on track three, that ring moves and the screen shows what it is touching. Grab the knob mid-move and the agent yields. You always win.
Touch-sensitive caps, 1 kHz scan, same bus as the pads. The nav dial has a ring too.
Ten inches, tilting,
two prints.
A 1280×800 touch panel in a bezel split along its long axis, hinged at the back on steel pins through printed knuckles. Tilt it up and the Jetson's fan breathes through the skin underneath.
The big screen is the player's. The agent gets a narrow strip of its own, down by the push-to-talk key.
It can hear.
It can be switched off.
A Jetson Orin Nano Super runs whisper, a 3B model and audio embeddings on the box; Claude in the cloud handles taste. Two mics behind the front skin mean "why is this muddy?" gets a real answer, because it listened. Every agent edit is a named, undoable diff: "undo what you did to the hats" works.
The kill switch is a real toggle under a flip cover. Off cuts the write line at the surface MCU: the agent can see and talk, but cannot touch. Wired, not configured.
Real jacks.
Musical time.
Two combo XLRs with phantom, four TRS outs, eight CV outs, MIDI two in and four out, USB, and gigabit Ethernet with PTP: the instrument is the clock the QLTY SOUND speakers lock to. Agent writes never happen "now". They land on the next beat, bar or phrase, through a scheduler that owns the grid.
Codec board: own design, 4 in / 8 out / 8 CV, TDM to the Jetson. The audio clock lives here, not in Linux.
Print it.
Play it.
Every printed part fits the Ø200 × 200 mm envelope. Hover a line in the list to find the part.