Thanks again to everyone who came out to see us at PAX East!  It’s a little strange to not have to spend all day at PAX, but it’s also nice to get a chance to sleep!  We have gotten a lot of questions there about the setup we were using there at PAX, and we wanted to link you to them so you could go ahead and get set up playing Frets on Fire X, a fork from Frets on Fire that adds all sorts of sweet functionality, including themes.

So for the record, we were running our entire rig this weekend with the following badass combo:

Frets on Fire X

death_au’s 8-bit NES theme

It looks like this:

First off, thanks to everyone who’s been stopping by the booth, and especially those of you who bought a button to support Child’s Play!  It’s been exhausting, but it’s been great to meet all of you, and  your energy has really helped us keep motivated throughout the day.  I hope you’ve had fun, and it’s been great to hear some of your comments.  We’ve been talking about a bunch of different things to different people throughout the day, and we want to thank you all for the feedback you’ve been giving us – it’s been great to get your suggestions figure out ways we can try and make our guitars better.  You guys have really been giving our guitars a great test; there’s nothing quite like having a thousand or so people experiment with your prototypes to test durability (there’s even some scrapes in the original frets of the guitar from where the strings are scraping against it!). We’ve figured out that if you have 60,000 strangers living in your house, you should probably install the kit with the internal option, since it’s a bit more durable, but other than a small glitch or two every so often, we’ve even been really impressed with how our guitars are holding up. So thanks so much, and we hope you’re enjoying playing our guitars as much as we enjoy your energy!

So we finally got our hands on a decent camera and a decent TV, so we took a nice intro video!   If you didn’t catch it on the main page, here it is – enjoy!

We’re getting all geared up for PAX East!  Tonight we went ahead and put together almost 100 kits – enough to run out of microcontrollers at least, although we’ve got another shipment of them waiting for us in Boston.  We’ll be selling them there at our booth, along with letting anyone who stops by play Frets on Fire with our custom guitars.  We’re also going to have some buttons with our logo available for sale, with the profits of those sales going to Child’s Play.  Of course, with all of our products, 10% of the profits go to charity anyways, but we thought the buttons would make a good piece of swag to raise even more money for such a good cause.  So if you’re coming to PAX, come check us out!

I’m sorry to report it, but it looks like we’re not going to be able to get our device FCC approved before PAX. I were hoping we could get it tested here in Spokane, but the lab that used to be here closed down, and besides, there might be tricky things about the guitar that make it’s current configuration hard to test.

A little bit of background, basically anything that has a chip inside it that runs faster than 1.705 megahertz needs to be tested to make sure that it complies with Chapter 15 of FCC regulations, ensuring that it doesn’t accidentally create electromagnetic interference (i.e., it doesn’t mess up your radio, TV, cell phone, etc. signals). This is because chips really draw their power every time the clock swings, instead of a constant drain, so the electricity going into the chip is rapidly going on and off. That on-and-off current is basically a tiny radio transmitter, hence the FCC wants to make sure that that little radio signal isn’t strong enough to jam your roommate’s radio. So you have to get it tested, and it’s why you see a little FCC logo on anything you plug into your computer.

What’s hard about the guitar is that I’m not sure how valid our testing becomes if, say, we use a different model of guitar, which we do a lot, or if we revised our circuit board at all. However, we are looking into the possibility of breaking up our design into a fast-clocked USB/Wii communication circuit, that would get approved once, and a slow-clocked guitar-reading circuit, which doesn’t need approval at all, since things going slower than 1.705 MHz are exempt. Or maybe we only have to get FCC verification instead of a declaration of conformity, which means that we can possibly self-test our equipment.

I’ll keep you posted,
Alan Chatham
Lead Developer

If you didn’t know, OpenChord is going to PAX East in Boston this month!  From March 26th through the 28th, you can catch us in the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts, right across the aisle from the Boston Indie Showcase and behind the Nintendo booth!  It’s pretty amazing, although the idea of being right next to one of the main events at PAX and behind one of the very top few companies in video games is a little bit daunting.. Oh, did I mention that EA is right across the aisle way too?

We’re very excited to be there, though! If you’re at PAX, come by and check us out – We’ll have 4 or 5 of our controllers hooked up to Frets on Fire with a whole heap of songs to play.  We’ll be selling kits and taking orders for guitars as well, along with a few other little morsels.  We’re looking into getting a few hundred OpenChord logo buttons made up, which we’ll be selling to raise money for charity, and we’ve also got a secret fun little project/bit o’ swag in the works that we’re really trying to get ready in time for PAX.

Speaking of charity, although we haven’t really publicized it before, OpenChord.org donates 10% of it’s profits to charity.  As a tiny company without stockholders, bank loans, piles of venture capital money and obligations, we’re free to not be the most ruthless, quarterly-profit-maximizing company we could be.  So we want to give back to the community and those in need, and so 10% of our profit goes straight to charity.  Our ultimate plan is to give to a number of causes supporting both humanitarian causes and the open source community, but we figure we’ll concentrate on one charity at a time.

In light of us going to PAX, and, y’know, being a video game company, we figure it’s only appropriate to donate our 10% at this time to Penny Arcade’s own Child’s Play charity, which donates games to children’s hospitals and brightens the lives of countless ill children. So if you do choose to purchase one of our kits, know that not only will you have our most sincere thanks and appreciation, you’ll also be making life a little better for sick children (and if you’ve already bought a kit from us, you already have!)