Back in the summer of 2007 I came out of the Open Source Hardware session at OSCON pretty jazzed about the x0xb0x -- somebody had actually made an open-source clone of the Roland TB-303! I signed up to buy a kit as soon as I could fire up a browser. Late last month (a year and a half later!) my name finally percolated to the top of the list. I ordered my kit (early Christmas present! thank you!) and went out and bought a soldering iron and some tools.
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If you've known me for awhile you know I'm really into all kinds of electronic music. For awhile I was totally infatuated with Max/MSP and all-digital laptop music. I'm still interested in that, but for my own music-making I've gravitated more towards physical instruments like keyboards and bass. I've also become more interested in instruments with hardware sequencers, like drum machines and the 303.
You can read elsewhere about how influential and cool the TB-303 is, or you can listen to pretty much any electronic album made from the late 1980s to the present. The 303 is not the easiest instrument to work with, but it's played a huge part in creating loop-based music.
Aside from the musical aspects, though, the x0xb0x is cool because it's open-source, or rather open hardware, which means that every aspect of its construction - the instructions, the parts list, and the PCB design, schematics, and firmware - is available for free downloading and sharing. LadyAda, the originator of the project, runs a forum for people who are building and hacking the kit, and even posts links on the x0xb0x site to people who are sourcing their own PCBs and parts, and building and selling x0xb0xes totally independent of her.
In the end, building an x0xb0x is going to be a lot more trouble than driving over to Guitar Center and forking over some cash, but in the end I'll end up with a unique intrument that I made myself. It's the musician equivalent of a Jedi making his own lightsaber or something.
Update 2009-1-12: I should clarify that the x0xb0x in the picture above is not mine, which I'm still in the process of building. This would go faster if I had an actual electronics setup at home, instead of running out to get parts or tools as I need them.