The Organelle makes it easy to explore new sounds and experiment with new ways of making music. It combines playful and intuitive controls with a powerful and flexible sound engine. The result is an instrument that is limitless in musical possibility and a joy to play.

Don't see the exact patch you need? You can create it yourself! Patches may be created and/or edited directly on the device as well as on a personal computer. Plug in a keyboard, mouse and monitor and begin customizing. The Organelle runs patches created in the powerful computer music programming environment Pure Data (and may also be written in lower level languages too!).

As you create patches or tweak existing ones you can share them with others! The Organelle is built with community interaction in mind. The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level.

Website:
http://www.critterandguitari.com/

Credits:
Critter & Guitari

Looks interesting,
but I wish it had a bit more I/O for hooking it up to external analogue hardware.

and I wish it was not $450 USD!! I am really wondering why it is that expensive...

I guess you can do the exact same thing with a raspberry pi and a few knobs for 1/5th the price, am I wrong?

@LucienR No you are not wrong, but you would probably need a lathe to make the cute? wooden buttons...
David.

Speaking of making a low-cost Organelle clone, anyone has insight?
Sounds like this project works with all the patches from the Critter & Guitari repo.
https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/5vlhfe/diy_critter_guitari_organelle/
There are some Pd externals on the C&G Github, but it sounds like they mostly use Pd Vanilla.

To me, the advantage of such a device is that the pre-made patches are supposed to just work. For instance, it sounds like their patches are polyphonic, which means less fiddling with poly.
From there, it could be easy to understand how the patches work. And the fact that Automatonism has some support can also prove useful.

So... Something like this could be particularly nice in teaching. Even if it’s on a breadboard with leads all tangled up.

Got a couple of Raspberry Pi boards with assorted sensors and actuators. Apart from a good audio HAT, it sounds like it wouldn’t take much to put one of these things together.

Thoughts?

I have one and I have to say that this is one of the best things that happened to puredata..
initially, just by looking at pictures of it and hearing sounds I wasn't attracted to it at all.. Also, knowing how a raspi 1ghz performs (like shit..) I was imagining that the device was too pricey and uncapable of doing something complex with audio..

Then a colleague bought one and When I tested my hardcore patches, I was very surprised to see that they did perform super good and even with very low audio latency.. Also. I have been through the pain of running pd headless in raspi, protecting the sd against writting, enabling usb patch storage, interfacing with display, latency optimization, etc etc.. and I have to say that they did a brilliant job..
This thing performs super good... it's reliable and easy, definitely, it could be cheaper, it could have another design, etc etc.. But if you judge it for what it does, it's the best thing out there, IMHO.....
Also, While I wouldn't pay the sticker price for it. A second hand unit for 3xx Eur / Dollar, (Even the old model) I think is a bargan.. Raspi + additional needed shit gets you close to that number but this would save you lots of headaches...(And probably still performs better)
I did run my patch in a raspi 3 + pisound and the performance and stability were worst (I don't know if is the raspi hardware or raspbian) So I also like to stick with the old Arch / Solid run combo (New units use rp3cm +raspian)
I will release soon a light version of s3rquencer as open source:
http://servando.teks.no/?patches
greetings
S