The S-Bahn out to Wuhlheide drops you at a station that feels far smaller than the venue it serves. Up the path, through the trees, and FEZ Berlin opens onto a plaza already filling with synth people: lanyards, custom enclosures in tote bags, the unmistakable posture of someone who’s been on their feet ten hours and is still excited about a knob layout.

Fragments, in no particular order

A man at the dadamachines booth, at hour eight of the day, telling me about the open-source firmware on the TBD-16 with the focused calm of someone who has explained this two hundred times today and still cares about the answer. The booth itself was small — three desks pushed together — but the queue was steady, and the conversations were technical in a way the bigger booths weren’t. I watched a woman ask, very specifically, what the build flags were for the ESP32-P4 audio loop. She got a real answer.

A floor below, in the corner where Making Sound Machines had set up Plinky 12, a teenager was playing the Chords panel with the absorbed intensity of a kid at a piano. Her mother stood behind her looking faintly worried about how long they’d been there. mmalex was off to the side, talking to an older man about a custom panel idea. The conversation was unhurried. Nothing about Plinky 12 felt like a launch — more like an instrument being slowly unveiled to the people it’s actually for.

The Bela booth had bigger crowds and brighter signage. Salt and Pepper looked the part, and people were definitely impressed. But — and this is the thing I noticed three or four times across the day — power and accessibility don’t always correlate. A board that can run any audio code you can write for it is not the same as a board you actually want to write code for. The interface is the instrument. The DSP is the exhaust pipe.

The conversation I keep replaying

In the corridor between halls, with a paper cup of bad coffee, mmalex told me — almost in passing — that you could order custom Plinky panels for £50 and the documentation was “designed for both humans and coding agents.” He said it the way you’d mention a feature, not the way you’d mention a manifesto. But it kept sitting differently in my head as the day went on.

The implication is that the dev workflow he’s expecting now includes an LLM as a collaborator on the panel layout, the API calls, the configuration code. Not as a gimmick — as a load-bearing part of the experience for non-experts who want to make their own panel. The company building the hardware has decided this is a real workflow people will use, and they’ve shaped the documentation accordingly.

I don’t know yet whether that’s the future or a passing phase. But the casualness with which he said it — that’s what I’m sitting with. The shift from “AI is something you might consider” to “AI is something we expect you’ll use” happened, for at least one corner of the synth-maker community, sometime before this Superbooth. Without fanfare. Just the quiet recalibration of who the documentation is written for.

What I bought

A Norns Shield. Plinky 12 is on order. The Grid I already had.

What I didn’t buy: anything I didn’t already have a clear plan for. That’s the discipline I came in with, and Superbooth is great at testing it. The room is full of beautiful things you don’t need.

Three days, one piece of hardware, one pre-order. That’s a successful trip.