Deej – The New Open-Source Hardware Audio Mixer

You’re playing your favorite game, chatting on Discord with your friends, and listening to your Spotify playlist in the background. But as usual, whenever the game gets too intense, you can’t hear your friends desperately trying to warn you that an enemy is sneaking up from behind! And when you turn down the game volume, it’s your music that suffers… In short, it’s always a mess trying to balance all the sounds from your applications!

But that was before deej, an open-source hardware audio mixer that lets you control the volume of each application independently, even better than a real DJ in a nightclub! And the best part is, you can build it yourself! DIY power!

Basically, deej is a box you can tinker with, featuring real physical sliders (old school style!) that control the volume of your apps: one fader for Spotify, another for your game, a third for Discord… You mix it all live like a pro, and voila, no more headaches!

The system is super simple: you have an Arduino board, a few potentiometers, wires, and a case to build. Nothing complicated, even for a novice in electronics like me! And if you have a 3D printer, you can even download ready-made models from Thingiverse. Otherwise, a good old piece of cardboard will do the trick too!

On the software side, it’s very well designed. You have a small program in Go that runs in the background on your PC, linking your mixer to your applications. You can easily configure it via a YAML file to assign each slider to a specific program. And if you’re a bit of a geek, you can even tweak the code to add features.

No more frantic alt-tabbing to adjust the volume at the right moment; you’ll be mixing in real time. In short, it’s a fantastic project that combines hardware, software, tinkering, and open-source. Everything I love!

Check it out here for the tutorial.