Building Open Source Music Hardware in India - Tarab Instruments

This talk is about building open source music hardware in India - and, more usefully, about the practical process knowledge required to actually do it here.

It started with a personal itch: I wanted a compact 16-knob MIDI controller to drive my Ableton Live sets. My APC40 MkII was too bulky, and a commercial Midi Fighter–style controller ran around ₹40,000 for what is, electrically, a fairly simple device. So I built my own Arduino-based version instead. Those controllers have since found a steady audience, which pushed me deeper into hardware: I now also design and build DIY Eurorack modules, including a delay module built around a Daisy Patch submodule, with a custom PCB co-designed with a collaborator in Pune.

Everything I build sits on the shoulders of open hardware - Mutable Instruments designs, the Arduino MIDI ecosystem, and the wider DIY synth community. But turning those open designs into working hardware in India meant solving a long list of problems that nobody hands you a manual for: where to reliably source components, where to get PCBs and front panels manufactured, which tools to learn, how to prototype affordably, and - maybe most importantly - where to find people and advice when you're stuck.

I'll walk through that process end to end. On the design side, that meant learning KiCad for schematic and PCB work, and FreeCAD and Fusion for designing the enclosures and front panels for both the controllers and the Eurorack modules. Along the way I wrote a few KiCad plugins to automate converting PCB component placements into front-panel hole layouts - the kind of small tooling gap you only discover once you're knee-deep in the work. I'll also cover sourcing and fabrication (components, PCBs, panels), prototyping, and a side quest into repairing music gear, which turned out to be one of the best ways to actually understand how this equipment works.

Two of the projects I'll reference are open and available:

Tarab MIDI 64 controller - https://github.com/basisvectors/tarab-midi-64
"TI - Super Simple Delay" Eurorack module (Daisy submodule) -
https://github.com/basisvectors/tape-delay-daisysm

The goal is that anyone in the room thinking "I could build that" leaves knowing concretely where to start, what it costs, and where the potholes are.

• A realistic picture of what it takes to design and build MIDI and Eurorack hardware in India, from first idea to a finished, usable unit.

• A practical sourcing and fabrication map: where to get components, PCBs, and front panels reliably, and roughly what it costs.

• The tooling reality: learning KiCad for PCB design and FreeCAD/Fusion for enclosures - including writing your own KiCad plugins to fill gaps in the workflow.

• How to build on existing open hardware (Mutable Instruments, Arduino MIDI, etc.) rather than starting from scratch, and how to contribute back.

• Where to find community, advice, and collaborators when you hit a wall.