An obsolete Aries rescued from a dumpster became the through-line for repair work, electronics study, and a long-running analog instrument obsession.The short version of the story.
About
Built from a rescued Aries and years of repair work.
Triangulum Research is one person's long project around a single family of instruments: keeping the Aries System 300 alive, documenting how it works, and designing new hardware that carries the same ideas forward.
Why the name
Triangulum sits beside Aries in the night sky. The triangle wave is one of the basic subtractive synthesis waveforms. “Research” fits because the project remains exploratory: not just restoring old systems, but learning through design, repair, failure analysis, and iteration.
Timeline
How it happened.
The Aries appears in a dumpster behind Hampshire College.
The system was discarded alongside other “obsolete” technology. It was incomplete, and the keyboard controller had already been thrown out after someone assumed it was dead.
The instrument becomes a working education in electronics.
Some modules worked, some did not, and many were not original kits at all. Reverse engineering, datasheet hunting, and module-level repairs turned the Aries into a long practical course in circuit behavior and failure.
Repair work expands beyond the synth.
Time spent fixing amplifiers, synths, drum machines, arcade hardware, speakers, computers, and odd domestic appliances built the broader repair sensibility behind Triangulum Research.
The project becomes an instrument studio.
With renewed interest in the synthesizer, new module designs in KiCad, and a live Eurorack market, the side path turned into real work: reviving rare Aries designs as new, buildable instruments.
The archive
Documentation, preserved and organized.
The resource library collects the Aries factory manuals, module schematics, and catalogs as scanned PDFs, alongside the best external references on the system.
The practice
Restoration and new designs, documented as they happen.
The journal follows the work itself: the System 300 restoration, the AT-327 multimode filter, and the production realities of small-run hardware.