We get letters! Well, email. I don’t actually get letters in the mail. But I do get email. So here are some of the correspondences I’ve had with people who have emailed me.

Iz asked me:

is there any possibility to develop a specific device, in the future, based on my needs and design ?
If such a project was remotely possible (as i don’t know who else to turn myself to), what would be the costs involved in making it happen ?
I guess it would vary with the difficulty of realization and various factors like the time you’d spent on r&d etc… but i’d want to know what costs i’m facing…

to which I said:

I’ve spent thousands of dollars developing beatseqr, just in terms of cost of tools, hardware, software, prototyping circuit boards, silicones, cases, and buying parts. I can’t even begin to imaging how much time I’ve spent on it. Hundreds of hours, easily.

I’d plan on $500 if you’re going to build something from scratch yourself. At first the bits and pieces don’t seem like they’ll add up to that much… it just seems to creep in that direction if you haven’t done it before. I’d plan on it costing more if you want someone else to build something for you from scratch. prototyping is pretty expensive, which is why I’m trying to sell copies of my project… All that work I did to figure out how to build one, might as well do to a bit more work and try to make more copies.

Keep in mind that the beatseqr firmware is open source, and there are/will be at least one hackable pin on the circuit board that you would be able to use to add a midi port if I can’t get one into the project natively. I’m kind of shooting for that, even if i can’t figure out how to make the box use it immediately… the firmware is always upgradable and either myself or hopefully someone else with a beatseqr will be able to write a version of the firmware that would have a reasonably accurate clock that could be used for midi/sync clock. That’s what’s cool about beatseqr… it’s open and upgradable. If you have a better idea for how it should work, you can modify the program on the arduino… and hopefully share your great idea with other beatseqr users.

Alternatively, you could take a look at a couple of other resources:

livid has what appear to be some really nice DIY things if you’re going to build one copy of a project.
http://shop.lividinstruments.com/builder.html

Sparkfun has some stuff too:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9598
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9108
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9595

It’s hard to believe, but the electronics are the easy part of building a controller. the case, knobs, and interface stuff are the hard part. Nothing’s impossible, though! I’m not a professional product designer or electrical engineer. When you’re adequately motivated, you can really achieve anything. Don’t try to solve all of the problems at once, just keep solving small parts of the problem and before you know it, you can start to see the overall picture. If I can do it, you can too.

-steve

Justin ask me:

I recently found your posting on all fader types for your project. Quite a nice piece. Not really a digital guy myself.

I recently bought a old disco mixer, a GLI 5990. In short, I’ve been searching the web for replacement parts, specifically the slide faders with LED’s built in. I found your site with the crazy big picture of sliders, and you have the one pictured, I think, that I’ve been looking for.

I was wondering if you could be of help. I just don’t know what to search for when it comes to faders with the LED in the center of the slider. My old dj mixer used 2 of the faders for cue pan and volume.

Sorry to ask this question out of the clear blue, but I’m just trying every avenue I can find. This mixers over 30 years old and I don’t know if these types of parts are available anymore.

Thanks Steve,
Justin

Ugh, this is a problem I have trying to source parts for beatseqr.

Hey Justin… Thanks for writing! Finding an exactly matching replacement part for *any* gear, regardless of age, can be a frustrating experience.

Mouser has some. Digikey has some as well. I don’t know if they’ll fit, or if the pin configuration will work, or if they’ll have the right resistance, curve type, etc. There are an awful lot of parameters to watch out for. making some careful measurements of the part you need to replace, and then reading the data sheets for candidate parts is going to be key.

• http://www.mouser.com/ slide potentiometers
• http://digikey.com, search for “slide potentiometer”

good luck!
-steve

Keep those emails coming.

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I’ve been thinking pretty deeply about the beatseqr project and came to the conclusion that I could no longer operate under the vendor-lock-in PCB CAD software I was using. So I went ahead and bought cadsoft Eagle. I had several reasons to do it.

• I feel like I gave the free and open source gEDA toolchain a solid attempt, and just couldn’t keep up with the technical requirements. I don’t disagree with the general philosophy behind it, and I definitely can see how useful it would be to distribute open schematics and board layouts. I’m not 100% sure where I stand on the topic yet. I think I’d be comfortable distributing schematics, but the really… really… really hard work comes from the layout. So I’m still thinking about it. Beatseqr will always be an open source firmware project — no question about it there. The controller is “JUST” a collection of interface devices. So the magic really comes from what you do with the firmware. I know I’m certainly not the worlds best sequencer firmware designer, so if you feel like you have a good idea for how to use beatseqr and can actually write some code to do it, you should be able to do that. So, to circle back to “why not gEDA” … it was too much for my puny brain to comprehend. There are quite a few features I liked in gEDA, but the iteration cycle was too hard for me. And I’m really too stupid to not have an autorouter.
• I wanted more freedom to choose which board house to use to get my designs fabricated. The previous software I was using.. was.. actually pretty nice considering it was quote-unquote FREE. It was free in so far that I wasn’t charged to use it, but I was forced to use the company that made the software as my fabrication house for my PCB designs. I may still use them, or maybe I won’t. I wanted the freedom to make a choice.
• I have a kit-built CNC router and I’ve been really wanting to try PCB trace isolation routing. What the heck is that, you may be asking… well here’s a photo of the first and second trial runs of a concept circuit I designed recently.
  
  The basic concept is to have a bare copper clad board held down onto a flat surface, and then have a PCB design… um… inverse-engraved into the fiberglass board. Meaning that the outlines of the traces on a circuit are cut out, leaving isolated areas of copper left on the board, which in effect is what PCB is. This is just a physical removal of unneeded metal, versus a chemical etching of the board do get to the same result.

  The overall reason to have this capability is to be able to test out conceptual designs in a small scale before including them in a main beatseqr circuit board design. The board above is the TLC5940, which is a chip that can manage the brightness of up to 16 LEDs. I have two-times-sixteen LEDs on the beatseqr board, so you can probably understand why I’d want to try out a circuit with this chip. If I can get it to work in line with the beatseqr firmware, I could offload some of the work to these chips, and use the remaining pins for other tasks.

  So why Eagle? Because they have user-submitted scripts you can run that let you take a design and have it spit out instructions that a CNC router can understand called gcode. And that lets me design a circuit and then cut it into “copper clad” for testing and debugging before accepting it into the main beatseqr project.

• Let’s face it: lots of people use Eagle. I would much *much* rather not have to have spent what I did to get the capability I have, but relative to the other cad packages in the space, it’s not that expensive. And it seems to be used by many many people in the arduino-using community. That’s who my audience is if they’re interested in learning from my work on this project. So it made a certain amount of sense to go with it versus any other package. Plus it runs on the mac, which is not a deal-breaker for me if software doesn’t, but I appreciate having a big chunk of my work flow on my platform of choice. In fact, all of the CNC work flow is on windows, including some special tools to optimize the tool paths of what gets generated out eagle. So it doesn’t bother me, mac or windows…

So that’s why eagle. I really wish there were some interim pricing steps between the free version and the pro version. But there isn’t. So, I had to bite the bullet. And now the bullet is bitten and I’m moving forward on the new version of the circuit boards.

And that’s pretty much the progress report. I’m learning eagle.

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Here’s a video of me playing around with the new features I wrote into the beatseqr v4 firmware. You can now change the midi channel per voice from a new mode on the faders, and you can also now offset the octave of the midi note numbers from a new knob mode. I’m still working on the interface on the LCD to make it clear what’s going on when you’re jumping around modes but as soon as it’s ready, I’ll make the source available.

Oh, and then I also have an iPad with Korg iMS-20 running.

Steve Cooley beatseqr arduino based drum sequencer plus reason & iPad + iMS-20 from stevecooley on Vimeo.

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wooo, well. I didn’t get around to the treadmill tonight or to recording a 3rd performance. I *DID* implement two kinda nice new features.

1. midi channel select fader mode. After doing these two solo perfs at home, I realized that if I had another kong loaded up and listening on midi channel 16, I could use faders to flip from channel 1 to channel 16 with confidence (all the way up, all the way down) … and that might help me transition from one preset to another. That would maybe free my other instrument up on the other dj mixer channel from *having* to have a kick drum in it.

2. octave adjust knob mode… this basically modifies the midi note number by a factor of 12 as you change it. I couldn’t figure out how to get max/msp to change all of the midi note numbers as I sent the new osc message to steppa… so it just modifies the value when the fader changes the midi note number. So, the knob range is octave adjust -3 to +5 … that covers everything… I probably over complicated it like this, but… just trying to keep things working as-is and then using the working state as the point of reference… (we start at midi note number 36. so any octave adjust is going to be relative to 36 being the “start”… so hence -3 octaves to get to midi note number 1… )

The user interface on the LCD is wiggity weird, but the functionality is pretty fun. I’m starting to wonder if we should have some way to turn off features you never use if you like. it’s starting to turn into a lot of paging…

So yeah, steppa, roxor, and the arduino firmware all need updating to get at this new stuff… uploads coming soon. I feel like I want to think about the interface a bit more before I unleash this on you.

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My good friend Solarno made a couple of really nice videos, check ‘em out!

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Hey so I’ve been working with Kickstarter.com to figure out a project I can do to help fund building more beatseqrs, and I thought since the holidays are mid-way through, I should just wait until after the new year to put it up and get it going. But, I’ve also been thinking that I could put my plan up here ahead of making it go live to gauge interest and make adjustments as necessary.

The short description of kickstarter.com is that someone makes a proposal to do some kind of creative project, and then offers different rewards for different levels of support from the community. The project has a target amount that it needs to raise in pledges from people in the community by a set time frame, or else nobody has to actually give the money they pledged, and everyone walks away. So, it’s an All-Or-Nothing kind of deal. If the project gets enough support to meet the target funding goal, then everyone who participated gets the reward for the level they pledged to. Pretty cool.

If you choose to participate, you’re helping to fund a project that is awesome. As an early adopter, you will get some cool extras to help you feel engaged in the project. I’m looking to raise a minimum of $1500, which would end up being only 5 assembled units. And, if we get over the target amount, I just keep building and building and building until everyone who participated gets what they pledged for.

So, here’s what the plan currently is for my beatseqr-on-kickstarter in descending order of pledge amount and rewards:

$1000 “give one, get one + training for two”:
Two v4 assembled beatseqr + case
one custom limited edition Acrylic/circuit board wall sculpture or custom painting incorporating prints made from parts circuit boards & parts
one chunk of a prototype Casting mold
1 year advertising tile space, significant funder page, or Artist page on beatseqr.com
One s.f. bay area training session in person for two people[restrictions apply: local bay area only, Saturday only, 2 weeks to plan, etc]
Up to two names on a future circuit board
two CDs or digital download releases of tracks made with beatseqr
two Patch, some Stickers

$750
any v4 assembled beatseqr + case
custom limited edition Acrylic/circuit board wall sculpture or custom painting incorporating prints made from parts circuit boards & parts
a chunk of a prototype Casting mold
1 year advertising tile space, significant funder page, or Artist page on beatseqr.com
s.f. bay area training in person [restrictions apply: local bay area only, Saturday only, 2 weeks to plan, etc]
name on a future circuit board
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$500
any assembled v4 beatseqr + case
Custom paintings, prints made from circuit boards
Chunks of a prototype Casting mold
Artist page on beatseqr.com
s.f. bay area training in person [restrictions apply: local bay area only, Saturday only, 2 weeks to plan, etc]
name on a future circuit board
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$450 Beatseqr, assembled, in a Wood case
A chunk of a prototype button Casting mold
Artist page on beatseqr.com
Custom painting or print made from circuit boards, beatseqr parts
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$350 Beatseqr v4, assembled, in a black ABS case
a chunk of a prototype casting mold
Artist page on beatseqr.com
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$300 Beatseqr fully assembled, no case
Artist page on beatseqr.com
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$300 Beatseqr kit, with black abs case + silicone buttons and mounting hardware
Artist page on beatseqr.com
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a Patch, some Stickers

$250
Beatseqr kit, no case, with arduino mega
Artist page on beatseqr.com
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers

$200
beatseqr kit no case, no arduino mega
Artist page on beatseqr.com
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers

$150
limited edition wall sculpture
A coupon for $50 off a future purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers
Publicity on beatseqr.com

$75
Prototype circuit boards, signed
A coupon for $30 off a future purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers
Publicity on beatseqr.com

$60
Silicone button test castings, signed and mounted for wall hanging
A coupon for $30 off a future purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers
Publicity on beatseqr.com

$40
Beatseqr illustration Tshirt
A coupon for $20 off a future purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers
Publicity on beatseqr.com

$20
a coupon in the pledge amount good towards the purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers
Publicity on beatseqr.com

$10
a coupon in the pledge amount good towards the purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
a CD or digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr
a custom embroidered patch from a limited run
Beatseqr logo stickers

$5
Beatseqr logo stickers
a coupon good for the pledge amount good towards the purchase of a beatseqr kit or assembled unit
digital download release of tracks made with beatseqr

$1 donation:
My undying thanks and gratitude for your encouragement.

Your comments are welcome, please chime in!

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Jonathan’s back with another video! This one shows how he set up beatseqr in his studio to work with his hardware audio devices. Sweet!!

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Yeah, check this video out!!

from Jonathan’s youtube description:

This is me playing around with Steve Cooley’s amazing beatseqr hardware controller. I’m running it through a Macbook Pro, with Roxor and Steppa, the open-source software designed specifically for the hardware. The Macbook is sending MIDI out to an Emu ESI-32, and I’m also adding Space Echo, spring reverb and digital delay to individual tracks. I spent about 10 minutes beforehand programming the step sequencer, otherwise everything is live.

SUPER sweet video, dude!!

Some back story … I met Jonathan back in 1997 when he was one of the guys running the legendary and seminal weekly internet radio broadcast show called the Beta Lounge. In fact, the beta lounge continues to broadcast, and they have, gasp!!, every show in their archive?! WHOA, they even have my very first DJ set in front of people, which consisted of me playing one turntable with vinyl, and a laptop running a program my brother wrote for me called “QTTurntable”… in 1997. Think about that. That was some cutting edge stuff for the time! But I’m sure my set sounds awful. I don’t even want to go listen to it, but it’s there. Too embarrassing for me.

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YES! GarageBand is controllable from external midi devices like keyboards, so that means that Steppa, the sequencer that runs with Beatseqr, can sequence drums, synths, and DLS sound fonts! It’s pretty cool. GarageBand makes setup pretty simple. Follow these steps:

0. FOLLOW THE ONE TIME, FIRST TIME SETUP INSTRUCTIONS
1. plug in your Beatseqr.
2. launch Steppa, Roxor, and Garageband. The order in which you do this doesn’t seem to matter.
3. Once everything is up and running, turn a knob on beatseqr so that Roxor and Steppa are displaying the same numbers. Go slowly if it doesn’t seem to be working, or try the other knob until it does. When you hit the play/stop button on beatseqr, you should see the chase lights running across the step sequence buttons, and the beat count lights (right above the tempo readout) should be lighting up in steppa.
4. In steppa, change the “Midi out device” drop down list to “from Steppa”.
5. Garageband may actually already be ready to play sound, so hit some of the sequence buttons on beatseqr. If things are working, you’ll probably hear the world’s best piano solo.
6. In garageband, double click on the software instrument track to bring up the controls to change it. Change it from whatever it is (probably a piano) to Drum Kits. Now your piano sounds should be drum sounds. Program in some more steps for the different voices, and you should get a drum sequence up and running pretty quickly.
7. Rock the heck out.

BONUS: Ok, so you want to rock more beats, but you don’t want to rock more bucks. Welp, you have a few options, but I can tell you that you’re entering into some fringe territory. Garageband has an instrument called “DLSMusicDevice”. You can research how to find, download, and extract free soundfont files from around the interwebs, but no guarantee that they’ll work particularly well. What you CAN do, for not tooooo much money is purchase a piece of software called “PolyPhontics GB”. What it does is let you create soundfonts that you *know* will work in garageband. The setup process is a little bit of a time eater, but for the price ($35), it’s actually really great! The catch here is that you’ll need to already have some samples, but those are pretty easy to find out in this great big inter wide world tube web of ours. PolyPhontics GB will even let you try out building ten 8 sample sound font packs for free, which, if you’ve noticed, matches up to Beatseqr’s 8 voice sequencing capability perfectly.

CHECK IT OUT:

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Since I haven’t tackled a final silk screened top plate for version 4, I thought I’d at least lay out something in a graphic so you could see what this version of beatseqr does.

font: Masking Tape Block

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