This project is a result of a workshop that Andrei Smirnov, the director of the Theremin Center for Electroacoustic Music at Moscow State Conservatory, gave at Sibelius Academy in November 2008. I installed a theremin sensor inside Beat the Bleep game I purchased from Smyths at Cork, Ireland one week earlier. I also installed Arduino to read the sensor and synthesize (brutally) audio.
This post is more or less documenting the state of this instrument when one week workshop ended. I will probably modify this somehow in the future. Maybe control lights with it…who knows.

This is the actual prototype. As you see, it uses old Arduino NG USB board that I would not have been able to install inside the case. I also needed to use the USB cable to feed DC to the board (not in the picture).

Above is a video demonstrating the earlier proto version. After I replaced USB Arduino with tiny Wee Arduino inside the case, I realized that this connection between computer and the board made to theremin sensor more stable. Final standalone version does work pretty poorly compared to proto version. It is suppose to divide 500Hz frequency with integers derived from the distance from the antenna. And this is suppose to form a harmonic series downwards. And it kind of does it, but the values from the sensors are a bit noisy, which will cause arpeggios which I on the other hand kind of like.

Here is one picture where you can actually see the theremin sensor board and a tinyest Arduino board I have ever seen. I will probably start using the Wee on all projects that can be done with 3.3v signals.