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
above: the first fully stuffed beatseqr circuit board, version 3.1
We’ve been radio silent for a while, but that’s only because we’ve been on overdrive getting ready for the bay area maker faire 2010. In addition to playing live gigs to further field test Beatseqr in the real world, we’ve also been ramping up our in-house production and prototyping capability in the form of a 24″ x 48″ CNC router. This new capability will (in theory) let us prototype new circuit and interface designs in house so we can move a lot more quickly to bake some concepts and roll out the products we want to use and think you’ll enjoy using too.
In the meantime, version 3.1 of the beatseqr circuit board is available. If you’re interested in a kit, there are a few options to discuss, so please fill out the form.
I preparation for our exhibit in the Maker Faire Bay Area 2010, I’m beginning to ramp up Beatseqr version 4. Behold, parts are starting to arrive:
My intention here is to offer kits, due to popular request.
I’m trying to take the plunge and follow in the smartly placed footsteps by our pals over at EMSL to learn and use the gEDA toolchain to help design and layout the next version of the Beatseqr pcb. It’s a bear, but I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.. I’m also looking into desktop CNC routers for several tasks in the fabrication process of parts. Um… I’m still building my case and doing my research, but you can take a peek at what I’m looking into here.
Hey there, we just got confirmation that we’re going to be showing Beatseqr at the 2010 Bay Area Maker Faire! Woohoo! We’re going into deep planning mode this week, so more details will follow. In the meantime, go buy your ticket!
Also, we’re considering applying for maker faires in detroit and new york. Want us to come to those? post a comment up.
Hey there, a little while back I had begun to put the portions of the beatseqr software and firmware onto github. Well I flailed on that for a while and got it to a point where I feel ok about announcing it now. Enjoy, and pass any improvements back to me!
We’ve been working on the internals quite a bit. This revision deals with some of the newb-ily named OSC messages. This doesn’t handle all of the problems, but it does take care of the significant issues with the step matrix.
Steppa v0.39
changed the OSC namespace to be prefixed with /beatseqr … look in stepcomm if you need to change that
overhauled the (8 individually configured files) rosco-row system to the (1 file) roxor_row system
moved all velocity and midi note num processing to stepcomm
Roxor 2.5 is available, look for the link inline with this post. changes:
revamped the OSC namespace overall to include the "/beatseqr" prefix
also significantly revamped the /matrix OSC namespace. I was originally looking at mirroring the way the Max5 matrixctrl object takes in data, but decided against it in favor of a significantly easier /matrix/[row]/[column]/[step] value method. This made is a lot easier to revamp the way roxor handles the step data. But that’s another update for another post.
roxor2_5.app.zip
Statistics: Posted by stevecooley – Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:49 am – Replies 0 – Views 32
Derek and I have been hard at work making some really great improvements to the beatseqr firmware and steppa sequencer. Here are a few of the things we’ve been doing lately:
I added a really nice feature that we’re calling “voice trigger indicator” … essentially what it does is flash the voice select LEDs as your sequence is running to indicate to you when each of the 8 channels is triggering. It’s easier to show than to tell, so I’ll get to work on a video for that asap.
Steppa now has a “current beat” set of indicator LEDs on the front interface. This was added so you can get an idea of where you are timing-wise if you’re doing stuff on your computer (instead of looking at the hardware, which will give you a *really* good idea of that all the time )
There’s been a bunch of minor features added to Steppa that mostly facilitate being able to pick up sequence data from within Max5. If you’re a max user, you can do all kinds of crazy stuff with the sequence as it’s running.
More good news while we’re talking about good news:
I have applied to exhibit at the Bay Area Maker Faire. We’re considering applying for Detroit and New York too, so if you want us to apply for those, leave a comment!
The arduino mega firmware is now open source. There are a bunch of things you would need to do in order to get started and I’ll highlight those in another post soon. I’ll update the license to indicate my intentions, but in a nutshell you’re free to download, analyze, improve, or modify the source, as long as you don’t resell it and you keep the original attribution intact with the code. Please do improve the software. I’m a school-trained artist first and a self-taught engineer second. http://github.com/stevecooley/beatseqr-software
Derek is going to our local ninja academy! Very exciting.
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. 
