steve cooley presents

The good news is that after I received my new boards, I was able to put one together and everything pretty much worked reasonably well. Well enough to use as demo units. So I have at least one more demo unit that I’ll be completing within the next month or so.

The not-entirely-bad news is that I did find some aspects of the board that I evaluated to be sub-optimal, so I’ve made a handful of changes and have submitted the design for manufacturing. I’m hoping to see those boards by the middle of next week.

This was my first ever project using Eagle cad, and I’m feeling pretty good about it. The learning curve was ok for me. I don’t have any professional experience doing this stuff, so I guess Eagle is easy enough. It’s a little tough at the beginning, but once you get into the groove of getting your parts created in a library, you’re good to go.

I pretty much took it as a given that I’d have some kind of critical bug or wiring error that I’d have to eat the costs of. The errors I found weren’t wiring problems, they were problems with drill sizes. All of the wiring was 100% accurate and functional. I ponied up for the autorouter, and I’m glad I did. I was able to move some things around on the layout, adjust some of the my fail-over pins and pads, re-run the autorouter, and was back to being in the fabrication queue with my board house within a couple of hours. Some people just don’t like eagle’s autorouter, but for me it’s awesome. I have something like 500 holes on my board and the autorouter did the job in about 2 minutes. Easily worth the cost. so I’m feeling like I can go ahead and work on the manufacturing optimizations I’ve been thinking about for pre-assembled units without having to worry about give up all of the hard work I put into the last functional layout.

So, some highlights on this round of boards:

• the board is now properly branded with the beatseqr logotype. Woo.
• I took a risk on putting holes on the board for the support legs on my faders, and they work great.
• I took a risk on putting offset pads on the board in order to use surface-mount board headers to interface with the arduino mega.. and they work pretty well!
• silk screening on two sides worked as I figured it would. I thought it through and reversed all the text on the b-place layer, and that was a good guess. I missed a bunch of stuff on the t-place layer that should have gone on the b-place layer, so that’s corrected in version 4.51. Lesson learned: change the color of the b-place layer… that will make it easier to see what’s on that layer.
• I put some holes on the board to line up with the mounting holes on the arduino mega, and they lined up perfectly
• Totally surprised, pleasantly, that my boards came back routed to my irregular shape, exactly as specified in my design. that’s a major post-production step that I just don’t have to worry about. I’m very happy about that.
• mounting holes for the project case lined up perfectly. This bullet and the one above are epic, because when I was using my board house’s own PCB layout program, I couldn’t specify the irregular board outline I need, and it wouldn’t let me put my mounting holes as close to the edge as I needed them. Both problems solved by going to eagle cad. Plus I can get silkscreening on the bottom layer at no additional cost, so heck yeah.
• all of the drill sizes that I ported over from my other design worked very well.

So … after a a few months of cooling the jets and learning eagle, I’m back to full speed ahead again.

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My brother in law posted a really cool video of him playing a new song with beatseqr and Ableton Live… check it out!

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Yeeeeah, check this video out! This is my friend DJ Mojo in L.A. He was a major guy in the underground electronic music scene in the 90′s, and since then has been documenting the history of our slice of the musical history spectrum, thinking very deeply about new music interfaces, producing remixes, and mix sessions. Here Mojo is demoing Beatseqr on a Windows machine using the Sonar DAW. Awesome!!

Find Mojo on Facebook, YouTube, and Soundcloud

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version 4.5 has been submitted for a limited test run. Here are the improvements:

0. using eagle cad pro, so that means I now have schematics!
1. highly rectilinear PCB component placement. Obey the grid.
2. surface mount headers for critical pins on the arduino mega. assuming I can get them soldered easily, this will solve the major assembly problem I was embarrassed by on previous versions. (H/T: Kevin… thanks for bringing these to my attention)
3. improved hackable mini protoboard area.
4. improved hackable pins on arduino mega headers.
5. holes for support legs on faders.
6. improved spacing of ledtacts and associated resistors.. should make assembly a little easier.
7. moved the arduino mega’s USB port closer to the edge of the board.
8. WAY improved beatseqr branding on the board.
9. silkscreen on both sides!
10. improved extra pin access to faders and potentiometers.
11. squeezed a piece of art onto the board. It is contained inside the LCD cutout area, so as long as I don’t plow right into it, it should be a really cool limited edition. (5 pieces)
12. included holes to mechanically affix the arduino mega to the board. The units I’ve shipped so far have had problems staying plugged in, and this should solve that problem.

Otherwise, this version, pin-out-wise, is the same as version 4. I’ll be working on changing some things from here, but this version was designed to get me back up to speed on my new tool set.

No jokin’ around. I barely have a clue what’s going on with Cadsoft Eagle. I had never used it for anything before this version of beatseqr, so I have no idea what the results are going to be. I’ll have to retool just about every other aspect of production as a result of making the switch from Advanced Circuits’ PCB Artist on windows to Eagle CAD on the Mac, but I think this is going to pay off in the long run. I want to start making mutations of this board, and I just couldn’t see the way forward any more with PCB Artist. Ironically, Advanced Circuits still had the best price for the PCB fabrication needs I have at this time, so not a total loss for them.

So, now I wait for my submission to clear DFM checks and head into production. Then I wait for my boards to show up. Then I need to build one out and verify everything works. If it does, then I have to redesign the CNC tooling for the PCB cutouts and the case completely, then redesign the silicone button mold and produce it in machinable wax. I have no idea what the state of my silicone parts are in, so could be ugly on that front.

There are a couple few other things I need to figure out too. I probably need to reorder some parts. I haven’t found LRF support that I like. Nothing seems to stick to this PCB case, so I’ll have to source some I can mechanically fasten to the case or, much worse, fabricate a solution myself.

Anyway, three of these units will be probably be available for USD$349 plus shipping and export duties where applicable. It’s going to take me a while to dial all the fabrication steps in, but hopefully by the end of april 2011, there will be some units available.

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Alright, so I’ve made some hard decisions. I decided to skip showing at Maker Faire this year. I decided to buy eagle cad. I decided to scale back my ambitious product road map. I decided to learn how to walk before I try running in Eagle. Basically, I decided that the pace I was developing beatseqr at was pretty tough to keep up, so I’ve decided to give myself some time to lay the foundation first.

But, I am making progress. Thank you to everyone who has expressed interest! I’m really encouraged by your feedback, and I’m chipping away at the tasks so I can get something ready for sale.

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A couple of weeks ago we played on KZSU’s Eklectronik Groove. Huge thanks to Holt Sorenson for setting us up and hosting us!

Here’s the whole set:
Haptic Synapses live on the Eclektronik Groove, KZSU Stanford 90.1

Hmm, I wonder what that was:

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