• 09Jun

  Hiatus

  Uncategorized Comments Off

  So I should have posted this about two weeks ago, I guess. Anyhow Maker Faire was a lot of fun, and we even won an editor’s choice ribbon, although we’re one of a number of winners (That’s just the tip of the iceberg – a 30 second Google search will reveal a lot more..  I mean, it’s appreciated and all, but the winners weren’t even mentioned on the Make Magazine blog – the prize seems to consist exclusively of a blue ribbon and a warm fuzzy feeling.)

  At any rate, long story short, we were expecting to sell a whole of kits there at Maker Faire.  And we didn’t.  Now, I’m sure some of it is the market there, some of it is the nature of the event, some of it was our presentation, but in the end, it just didn’t seem like there was enough real interest in actually buying OpenChord guitars and kits to justify continuing with this as a commercial enterprise.  There are a few things I’m looking into in terms of getting some funding (like Kickstarter) to get FCC testing and such – it seems like being able to sell full guitars might still be something more people would be interested in – but I’ve got some other stuff I’ve been working on, including other stuff that actually pays money, and so at this point, that stuff is taking priority.

  I guess on a certain level, I’m a bit burnt out on the project, too.  After stressing about getting a bunch of kits ready for Maker Faire that are now sitting in the basement, it’s a bit discouraging.  There are still some loose ends I want to wrap up (specifically MIDI, now that the new board will support an actual MIDI hardware interface), but I’m taking a bit of a break while I do some other stuff and figure out where to go from here, if to go on at all.

  I still will be doing support for any kits you’ve bought, and of course the store is still open – I’ll still be shipping out any kits or parts if you order it.  In fact, although I should have done this WAY earlier as well, here are some pictures of the new May boards, with all the components in, and with all the wires in:

  This is the May circuit board with all the parts in it – there are some extra spaces for things that might come in the future, and the rows of holes by the Frets and Strings ports are so you can snake your wires through them for strain-relief.

  Here’s a picture with some of the wires attached.  In this photo, I’ve got the wires to the strings attached to a header pin block for ease of detachment/repair (it is one of the prototypes we take to events like Maker Faire, so easy repariability is key!):

  Anyhow, as always, if you need any help with your kit, or any questions, e-mail us, comment here, or whatever!

  -Alan Chatham, guy behind this all

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• 21May

  Maker Faire, Day Zero

  Uncategorized Comments Off

  We’ve arrived at Maker Faire! Today is setup, but we did have a nice time showing off the guitar and the prototype violin this morning for the Young Maker’s day. They’ve got the Singing Tesla Coils here, so it was pretty cool to listen to them, even if the RF emissions they generate knock our guitars out of commission when they run… So while it’s exhausting (we’re staying with friends in Berkeley, and it’s like 2 hours away on the train…), it’ll be a good time!

  Also, we’re on Hack-a-Day, Kotaku, and Joystiq, today, along with others – thanks for checking out the Street Fighter video! Hopefully we’ll take some videos of people here in San Francisco with the bass, guitar, and (work-in-progress) violin. Stop by if you’re in the area!

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• 19May

  Maker Faire

  Announcements Comments Off

  Just to let you know, we’re going to be at Maker Faire this coming weekend there in San Francisco!  Please come by and check us out if you’re in the area! We’ll be demoing the V1 as well as our work so far on the V1 Violin, and we’d love to see you!
  

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• 19May

  Articles and Posts!

  Interviews and Media Comments Off

  If you didn’t see it, our video involving Street Fighter 4 is on Hack-a-Day.  Also, there’s an interview up on OpenSource.com, where I muse about why we’re open source, the challenges, and our future.  Thanks!

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• 05May

  Our Apologies

  Announcements Comments Off

  We’re sorry, but in building a few more kits, we’ve noticed that there are occasional problems with a kit not working. At first, we figured that it was just some random errors in a handful of boards. However, with the help of the new oscilloscope, we’ve found the real culprit – on the D- line of the USB connection, there is a 10K pull-up resistor. It turns out that 10K is probably on the very limit of the effective range. Instead, it should be more along the lines of 1.5K Ohms, although anywhere between 1K and 5K should probably work.

  The issue is that the 10K resistor is just doesn’t let quite enough current through to be able to pull the data line up to the “High” state and hold it there on it’s own. Depending on the hardware it’s connected to, the scope is showing that during long periods of being held “High”, with the 10K, the line drifts back to a semi-high state, where the host is presumably holding the line just too low below the 2.8V cutoff for the USB spec.’s High mark, or maybe just letting it float. At any rate, voltages that individual hosts see as “High” can vary surprisingly widely. For instance, some computers will see a 5v signal as “High” and some won’t – the spec. sets “High” at 2.8v-3.6v, but USB puts power out at 5 volts. Figure that one out. Unluckily, it turns out that the 10K resistors we’ve been using have been bringing the lines down to around 2.7-2.8v in a few cases, while being fine in others.

  So we’re really sorry about all of this. If you’d like us to, we’re more than happy to send you some replacement resistors, or if you’d like, we’d be happy to pay the shipping and replace the resistors ourselves, test out your system, and update all the firmware for you. Just send us an e-mail, and we’ll work everything out.

  If you’ve got some resistors lying around, here is the resistor in question that needs replacement:

  

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• 24Apr

  Street Fighter

  Development, Videos Comments Off

  We’ve been working on some odds and ends, but we just wanted to share a little video showing off the versatility of the OpenChord controller kit – We reprogrammed the V1 to show up as a DualShock 3 on the PS3, and here’s Alan playing a bit of Street Fighter 4, on the guitar:

  The code for this is in the SVN, under the Guitar Fighting branch – feel free to download it and put it on your V1. In order to update the firmware, plug the V1 into a PC while holding the red/plus button – it should show up in Windows as BootloaderHID. Then grab this program here, hit “Find Device”, then choose the appropriate .hex file, then hit upload. You should be fighting in no time!

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• 12Apr

  Bad News, Good News

  Development, Progress Update Comments Off

  First, the bad news – We’re not going to be able to implement Xbox 360 compatibility on our own.  Looking into it, the security the 360 uses is based on a pretty hardcore chip, and while that chip has been recently hacked, doing so involves using an electron microscope, and might only be valid for one chip at a time.  If anyone knows any contacts within Microsoft who might be able to talk to us regarding licensing these chips, we’d love to hear from you, but like most other big developers, Microsoft hasn’t been too keen on letting tiny companies get their hands on those chips.  I can’t blame them; if there were hundreds of cheap 3rd party controllers making the Xbox 360 experience much worse, or allowing for cheating on multiplayer online games, nobody blames the controller manufacturers, just Microsoft.  Still, for now, it looks like native 360 compatibility is out.  However, if you’re really interested in using the V1 on the 360, send us an e-mail, since if you’re willing to use the circuit board from an existing guitar controller, we can probably work something out for that pretty easily.

  On the good news side of things, after some re-jiggering and testing, we’ve merged the Wii and PS3 firmware!  This means that you don’t have to do a firmware update to switch between the systems anymore, and it’s going to be easier to figure out which firmware  you need.  Instead of V1_Wii.hex and V1_USB.hex series’ of binaries, they’re being replaced by the OpenChordV1.hex series.  Most people should need the 12MHz hex file, but there are still some 16 Mhz boards out there – Anyone who bought kits at PAX or since then has the 12 MHz board, but to check, if you see 16.000 on the little silver oval on the PCB, then you’ve got a 16 MHz crystal, so you’ll need the 16 MHz code.  Or send us an e-mail if you’d like a 12 MHz crystal; we’re more than happy to drop one in the mail for you, free of charge.

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• 07Apr

  Back in Spokane

  Development, Progress Update Comments Off

  After a few weeks of being on the East Coast, I’m finally back in Spokane, ready to start doing more hardcore engineering (and taxes.)! Right now, our Xbox 360 is Red Ringed, but I’m fixing that tomorrow; however, things aren’t looking so hot for Xbox support right now – nobody it seems has been able to get anything near working. Instead, everyone making arcade sticks and the like have just been ripping out the PCB from an existing controller and interfacing with that – since guitar controllers are at least $20 each, and a lot of plastic, it seems pretty expensive and wasteful to be ripping up whole controllers just for a little chip.. If it comes down to that, though, we’ll go ahead and make some instructions for how to add Xbox 360 support in such a way.

  That said, we’re also looking at getting an oscilloscope to check out and see if we can maybe send the proper signals to the Xbox – we’ll let you know how that one goes, but judging from the seeming lack of 3rd party Chinese controllers, it doesn’t look particularly promising, unfortunately.
  As a side note, if anyone is interested in having a PlayStation2 compatible guitar, let us know. It’s something that we were working on, but couldn’t figure out; however, I’m starting up a project with Kellbot, working to integrate our boards with her awesome Katamari Ball, so since I’ll be dusting off that PS2 code, I’m wondering how much effort we should be putting into getting it to work for the guitar as well?

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• 04Apr

  Firmware Update – Gap Chords

  Development, New Release Comments Off

  One thing we noticed a lot at PAX was that it’s hard for people to hit those green/yellow, red/blue, and yellow/orange in-game chords (what we refer to as “Gap Chords”) when you’re in fret mode.  We saw a lot of people get kind of frustrated that when they held a barre chord or power chord, they’d get all 3 game buttons to light up, instead of the 2 outside buttons of the pattern only. Since fret mode more or less exists to ease the player from playing with a regular guitar controller to playing with a regular guitar, a situation where it’s difficult to hit those gap chords without being pretty careful where your fingers are touching is not helping us meet our goal.

  So we changed it!  Since full 3 button chords are relatively rare in-game compared to gap chords, we’ve now made it so that to press those chords, you now have to press down all 6 strings.  Anything less, and the guitar will assume that you want a gap chord and give you that – this means that barre chords across all 6 strings will likely still give you all 3 buttons lit up, but if you make it a bit shorter, you’ll probably wind up with the gap chord you wanted.

  Unfortunately, for you expert players out there, this update might make it somewhat harder to hit those 3 button chords, and it doesn’t do anything to help with chords like green/red/blue.  Those ones are a little more complicated in terms of notes being electrically connected by shared frets on the fretboard, so there might not be anything that we can do to make those easier – I’ll have to study it further.

  In the meantime, the new code is available in the Binaries folder of the SVN repository on the Google Code site – get the appropriate .hex file for either the USB or the Wii version, depending on what system you’re running your games on.  If you download it, please let us know what you think about the changes, and if they help out or if they’re garbage.

  It’s the sort of thing that we’ve been playing with the guitar for a while, and just got used to handling it in certain ways, and, well, just didn’t have the user testing we needed to have had.  Like all developers should know, if you made the product, you’re really in no good position to test it, since you’ve already got these images in your head as to how things are “supposed to be done” – that was like Lesson #1 in the UI design course I took in college (sorry Prof. Alvarado!).  Ironically, that being said, we haven’t really tested out this update, so if you download and play around with the new firmware, let us know how you like it!

  Also, if you’re hardcore, the change itself is pretty easy to adjust in the code, so if you’re into messing with source code, grab a snapshot of our SVN and I can tell you where to mess around with this new feature.

  Anyhow, thanks to everyone who played at PAX for helping us find this stuff out, and enjoy the new firmware!

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• 31Mar

  PAX East Setup

  Announcements, Site Updates Comments Off

  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:

  

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