Success. Definitely good enough for a first attempt… and several lessons learned in the process. I’ll be tightening up the box outlines and trusting the accuracy a little more next time. Everything lined up exactly how it was designed to, to the point of me now realizing that the steps I took to give myself some margin of error were not needed at all. Everything lined up, surprise!

There’s been a lot of good progress being made, some of which is fundamental to playing and performance, and some of which is tightening up the user experience. Here’s a short list of the new stuff:

* external case designed and prepped for laser cutting:


ready to go, I’m off to Techshop tonight to try to get these done. Hopefully there will be an update tomorrow on how it went.
* Midi CC slider mode. While not strictly outputting midi cc data directly from roxor, it does spit out OSC data for 8 controls that canbe connected to Osculator today, and steppa soon.
* master tempo set and tempo adjust knob modes. Along with swing, you can now dial in coarse and fine tempo values from right on the hardware.
* tempo and swing controls feedback on the lcd. The knobs behave as the sliders do in regards to maintaining their values until you return the control to the last known position before it will change the value, and using the controls don’t overwhelm the lcd. Two thing you might not notice, but thats what good user experience is all about.

a quick update to let you know that midi note number changes are preliminarily functional from the beatseqr version 3 hardware! Hitting the slider mode select buttons to go from midi “velocity” to “midi note num” will let you explore different notes in your midi instrument… this is great if you’re using an instrument like Ultrabeat in Logic Studio or Logic Express, because this will let you set any of the voices to any of the drum sounds. This should in theory work for any instrument too.. it’s just really cool in ultrabeat to be able to set a pattern up and then use the sliders to change what sounds are being used for each of the pattern voices. Still some rough edges to work out, but this is another huge step in the right direction of letting you spend less time looking at your screen with your hand on a mouse, and more time with your hands on the beat.

Here’s Beatseqr v3. I did discover some bugs in the circuit board, and I also discovered all kinds of fun new things I didn’t know previously.. I won’t go into details. The end result is that version 3 is alive and well! Roll over the photo above to see the breakdown of how I laid out this version.

awesome demo!

More photos and a lot of progress coming soon.

Whew… I can’t wait to see how my PCBs turned out… but I’ll have to.

I just ordered 5 of these:

I’ve never ordered custom PCB’s before in my life, so this awesome and terrifying all at the same time.  So hopefully, in a few weeks I’ll get my boards and I’ll be able to put one together, test it out, have everything work out just fine, and then I can work on laser cutting the panel and enclosure… and bask in the glow of a successful venture into horrifyingly unknown territory.  Cross your fingers!

We are pleased to announce that Roxor 4.2 and Steppa v0.26 are available on the downloads page.

Roxor 4.2 features:

• Launching!  I think I’ve figured out all of framework problems I was having.
• Auto-updates, and if not fully automatic, try “check for updates” in the application menu.

Steppa v0.26 features:

• takes advantage of the /midinotenum1 – /midinotenum8 OSC messages that Roxor can emit… so for instance, in Roxor, there are what we call stepper controls labeled “Note number” and sub-labeled 1 through 8 as see highlighted in yellow in this image:
• Steppa will now take advantage of these controls and let you set the arbitrary midi note number to whatever these controls are set for.  This is awesome, because now you can really expand, for instance, which of the 25 instruments in Apple’s Logic Ultrabeat plugin you want to loop with in roxor+steppa:
  

  Or instead of being stopped at instrument 8 in Propellerhead Reason’s Redrum drum module, you could push one or two channels out to address redrum’s 9th and 10th instrument slot by changing the midi note number controls up a couple of numbers.
  

  And further research has shown that you easily use roxor+steppa to control synth and sampler modules in any Apple Mac OS X application that can receive and utilize midi notes…  some of which include PureData, Quartz Composer, Chuck, Live, Logic, Garageband, Motion (!)… the list goes on and on and on.

Big huge ups to Derek on implementing midinotenum!!  It’s awesome!