pending any kind of hold my board house may have for my order, I’m expecting a new small batch of boards to arrive in a couple of weeks. There are a couple of changes that I hope will translate to improvements.
1. the older style potentiometers that required headers, wiring, and holes drilled through the circuit board are now replaced by pcb-mount style potentiometers. I’ve tried really hard to get it right, so I’m hoping I did.
2. fader mounting holes are resized to be the correct size… or.. a better size. I’d made an error on the v3.1 boards in forgetting to fix the problem I saw on the v3 boards. So they should go in easy peasy now.
3. mounting holes are going to be fabricated by the board house. It took me a while to figure out that I can get them to do that for me. The net result is that a significant amount of work will be reduced to a couple of machining operations once I get the boards. The cost to get them to do the final machining operations was far outweighed by my ability to do it on my bandsaw in no time.
4. Electrical testing. This extra board house option will further increase my confidence in the product I sell. I could test the boards myself, but I’d rather be working on more creative things. I figured it was best to leave this important step up to people who are experts at quality control.
I have beatseqr v3.1 unassembled kits available. The assembly is pretty straight forward, with only a couple of weird things you’ll need to do to undo some of the issues I’m reworking for the next version, whenever that ends up being. This version works, and aside from some slightly inconvenient assembly steps, it’s relatively easy work.
Fully built and battle tested with hard acrylic keys, acrylic case & knobs, $349
Kit with arduino mega, $249
Kit with NO arduino mega, $199
kit prices do not include buttons, case, knobs, or cables. contact steve@beatseqr.com for more info.
I’m at home, and I’ve had dinner, and I’m… exhausted! We had such a great time showing off Beatseqr to hundreds of people this weekend! Thank you so much for coming and checking it out! I have some video coming soon to recap the reception beatseqr got…… soon. Maybe in a couple of days. I’m pretty tired. Saturday was a 13 hour show day, and sunday was 11 hours, so… I’m going to go get to bed early tonight and sleep very very well, I think!
Anyway, if you want to get in touch with me, send email to steve@beatseqr.com
Hey, just testing out a wordpress plugin I’m writing to embed etsy items into wordpress posts… it’s working pretty well, and there’s room for improvement, but here we go:
Beatseqr is an arduino mega based computer interface. It is aimed at electronic musicians and visualists. By itself, it connects to a desktop app that runs on mac or windows and can send out OSC messages to arbitrary network ports. However, combine beatseqr with a tightly integrated sequencer like Dajis Systems' Steppa (included in the price) and you have a powerful interface to create a MIDI loop which you can use to control sounds from pretty much any music software that accepts incoming midi data. We've tested it out with Logic, Live, Reason, Quartz Composer, Max/MSP, PureData, and Processing. It works great!
The source code for the arduino firmware, the processing app, and the max/msp patch are all available for you to modify, customize, and improve as your skills will allow. You don't have to be technical to use beatseqr, but it will certainly help if you're thinking about modifying the firmware. You'll be using the free and open source Arduino IDE to do that. And hey, you'll be getting an Arduino Mega that you can take out of the beatseqr hardware and use for whatever you want.
Loads of photos, videos, and a small but growing library of documentation is available on http://beatseqr.com
Notes about the photos... photos 1-4 are by myself, photo #5 is by my friend Donald Bell. Photo 4 is a size comparison next to a Roland TR909, but it's not included in this sale. Also, other photos feature laptops... they're also not included. Duh, right? :)
Shipping will be insured and with tracking numbers.
our band Haptic Synapses did a live show using 3 beatseqrs at Radio Integrated in alameda on january 29th, 2010. Our friend Donald Bell stopped by for a test drive and took some nice photos, which are here:
The net result is that a significant amount of work will be reduced to a couple of machining operations once I get the boards. The cost to get them to do the final machining operations was far outweighed by my ability to do it on my bandsaw in no time.
