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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Anyone contemplating a cold winter and wanting to immerse themselves in a fun indoor project, pick up a Teensy and get project-ing. I have built several small projects with Teensies (?) and always find them enjoyable.

We live in a magic time when there are so many projects online, you can easily breadboard up one with the Teensy (or other small devices) and go all the way to professional-looking PCB with very little outlay in cash.

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It's insane. I was just commenting to colleagues earlier today that $10 now gets you more compute than I had for the first decade of my career. And not just a little bit more either.

https://www.marktplaats.nl/v/hobby-en-vrije-tijd/elektronica...

Teensies are very much overkill for a lot of projects. I have gathered a decent amount of random microcontroller boards now and it's just a lot of fun to make them do random things.

I have some arduino nano knockoffs to do the really simple pin toggle things, some ESP8266 modules for when I need to do wifi enabled things. A few wiznet modules if I need to add ethernet to any module and the new raspberry pi pico boards are amazing if you need more performance and a really nice SDK.

The Teensy is a bit more expensive than those but you get almost an order of magnitude more performance for that cost, the perfect product between the other MCUs and just putting a linux enabled SBC in your project

Many people don't realize just how powerful it is. I built an analog synth emulator (although this post gave some ideas about doing a web UI for it) for fun.

I used a single 4.1 to host a UART (MAX232) to give me hardware serial, scan a home-built keyboard, and maintain a text buffer and update a 3.5" LCD display. (In short I built a modern terminal around the Teensy 4.1.)

Nice, one of the things I'm doing in my "spare" time is building a framebuffer that is driven by quad-spi on a ULX3S board. The plan is to have it act as a terminal with both a character mode, a vector mode (ala Tek4016), and a pixel mode using sixel graphics. Given that it is planned to be attached to a computer system as it's "visual output device" I really hadn't given too much thought to making it a standalone terminal but that would be an interesting application for it.

There's many synthesizers that use a Teensy as the brains of the thing.

My favourite by far is the Dirtywave M8, which is an incredible bit of hardware & software design, in UI & UX.

They're unfortunately sold out, now, but they're incredible bits of kit. If you have a Teensy and some spare time, check out the Headless version of the firmware: https://github.com/Dirtywave/M8HeadlessFirmware -- upload it to your Teensy, and head to https://m8.run to get a fully featured tracker in your browser.

The Polyend Tracker is another portable synth that is backed by a Teensy -- not quite as neat, but still neat.

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