Cosmolab: Build Your Own Instrument, the Proper Way

March 31, 2026 by Little Music

There is something quietly exciting about a project that takes the hard parts of building electronic instruments and makes them approachable - without dumbing anything down. Faselunare's Cosmolab is exactly that kind of thing. It is a modular, open-source hardware developer kit that lets you build synthesizers, effects processors, and MIDI devices from scratch. Or rather, from boards.

Faselunare Cosmolab boards

A Kit Built Around the Daisy Seed

At the heart of Cosmolab is the Electrosmith Daisy Seed - an ARM-based audio processing module that has become something of a favourite in the DIY and Eurorack communities. The Daisy Seed handles all the real-time DSP work, and it is powerful enough that companies like Qu-Bit Electronix and Noise Engineering use it as the brain of their professional modules. So the processing foundation here is solid.

Faselunare have built an entire ecosystem of boards around it. There is a main carrier board that houses the Daisy Seed, an Audio I/O board with two 6.3mm inputs, stereo outputs and a headphone jack, a MIDI board with proper 5-pin DIN sockets, a CV board with four CV inputs, two CV outputs, and gate I/O for plugging into a Eurorack system, and a 128×64 OLED display board. For control, you get a board with eight illuminated potentiometers and your choice of a 16-button sequencer keyboard or a 12-note chromatic keyboard.

Everything connects without soldering. The boards slot together, and that is genuinely impressive for something aimed at this level of prototyping work.

Programming From Every Angle

What strikes me most about Cosmolab is how many doors it leaves open when it comes to programming. You can write C++ if you want full control. You can use Arduino if you prefer a gentler start. But you can also patch in MAX/MSP via Gen~, or use PlugData - which means you can effectively take a Pure Data patch you have been building on your laptop and push it into hardware. That last bit is a real game-changer for a certain kind of musician-developer who lives in those environments. Faust and Rust are supported too, for those who like their audio programming functional or low-level.

Who Is It For?

Faselunare position Cosmolab for professional developers, educators, and enthusiastic amateurs - and I think that range is honest. This is not a beginner's first kit. You still need to understand what you are building and what you want it to do. But the barrier to entry is much lower than designing your own PCB and fighting with a soldering iron, and the ceiling is as high as you want to push it.

Cosmolab in use

The CV module means it slots into a Eurorack setup for prototyping modules, which is a nice touch. The whole system feels like it was designed by people who actually use this kind of gear - Faselunare have been making modular synthesizers and open-source instruments for years, and that experience shows in the thoughtfulness of the board selection.

The campaign ran on Indiegogo. For what you are getting - a no-soldering, multi-language, Eurorack-compatible audio prototyping platform - it feels aimed squarely at serious makers who are ready to invest in a proper development setup.