Sweden’s teenage engineering specializes in lightweight, compact, and powerful synthesizers. Among their innovations includes a series of small, battery-powered synthesizers that are roughly the size of a pocket calculator and barely thicker than a printed circuit board. These pint-sized powerhouses—called pocket operators—can be connected together to produce and record everything from ambient and EDM to techno and pop music.

The pocket operator series embodies the company’s mission—to grow the synthesizer population—with video game-inspired graphics, a simple-but-intuitive interface, animated LCD displays and price points as low as $49USD.

As co-founder David Eriksson explains, “We weren’t really trying to cater to a particular market. We wanted to make products you didn’t have to go to specialized stores to buy. We wanted to make them accessible for anyone; like something you could just pick up as a birthday present for a friend, or just start using by yourself right out of the box.”

The series—along with everything else teenage engineering creates—was developed using Altium Designer. 

Altium’s CoDesigner capability, built into Altium Designer, bridges the gap between ECAD and MCAD software tools, allowing for effortless collaboration while addressing pervasive file transfer and conversion issues that hamper the design process.

Getting the ECAD/MCAD Balance Right

For their design process, teenage engineering handles everything in-house, from electrical and mechanical engineering to industrial design and software development. Altium Designer has been central to the creation of the pocket operators series.

“Since we're mainly doing portable, ultra-low power devices, space and tolerances are by far the most challenging,” Eriksson continues, “Our board designs usually start out on the MCAD side, as we build up the overall electromechanical look and feel. Since we're developing our own parts and solutions for rotary encoders, buttons and even BLDC motors, an ultra-tight tolerance chain is key when bouncing designs back and forth between Altium and MCAD.”

Altium’s CoDesigner capability can help make teenage engineering’s MCAD/ECAD designs flow even easier between disparate software tools using just a simple plug-in that can be installed in their MCAD software.

The CoDesigner capability effectively eliminates the need for importing, exporting, or converting file formats between disparate MCAD and ECAD systems—everything is built into Altium Designer and effortlessly accessible via Altium 365, the world’s only cloud platform for printed circuit board design and realization.

“We’ve been doing some command line scripts to enable two-way integration between Altium Designer and MCU pin configurations/device trees. Our little dream is that things in the near future would utilize more machine learning and fuzzy algorithms to help detect those classic mistakes when designing something new. Combined with the best from modern software workflows, utilizing "Continuous Integration" to build and test would for sure be the next level of ECAD, Eriksson adds.

Systems that Simply Work

The simplicity of teenage engineering’s designs, including the pocket operator series, allows them to live on far longer than most devices at the same price point.

“The idea behind the pocket operator was to produce a synthesizer with a minimal use of plastic, a custom LCD, and avoiding the use of aging parts like lithium batteries, basically ensuring that if these devices are forgotten about and then found 20 years later, they’ll still be able to boot up and make some noise,” Eriksson explains.

Designing something this unique took special attention to detail, ensuring the devices look as good as they sound. “We spent a lot of time when we designed the pocket operators to get the silkscreen perfect. Since we had strict requirements on colors, including multicolor print, we ended up developing our paint and colors that we consign to our PCB fab house.” 

The pocket operators only require two AAA batteries to operate; when in standby mode, they can last up to two years. Connecting multiple units to achieve full, lush sounds requires just simple 3.5mm aux cables. “And if you put them in a drawer and forget about them, they’ll still run, animating the LCD display whenever you’re ready to press play,” Eriksson continues.

The same can be said for the Altium CoDesigner capability; the MCAD CoDesigner extension is included in the standard Altium Designer installation, so the CoDesigner panel is always in the PCB editor, automatically converting files so designers can focus on projects without downloads or data loss.

From the MCAD side, accessing the CoDesigner capability is just as easy. After a free plug-in is downloaded and installed, the CoDesigner panel will appear on the MCAD side, allowing for effortless bi-directional transfers and automatic file conversion from project to project.