• 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:

  
• 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!
• 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.
• 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?
• 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!
• 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:

  
• 27Mar

  PAX East!

  Announcements Comments Off

  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!
• 26Mar

  New Introduction

  Site Updates, Videos Comments Off

  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!
• 23Mar

  Kits Kits Kits!

  New Release, Progress Update Comments Off

  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!
• 18Mar

  FCC Testing, Round 2

  Progress Update Comments Off

  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

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