We’re back, or at least back-ish – We’ll be at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, going from September 3rd through the 5th.  Due to a number of factors, there’s a good chance that it’s going to be the last convention that we do, so we’re just going there and trying to have a good time.

Going along with the end of conventions, from here on out, we’re going to be donating 100% of our profits to charity – Child’s Play, to be exact.

One other quick thing to mention – we’ve added some new code to the binaries section on the Google Code page, new code that fixes a bug where the controller wasn’t being recognized by Windows Vista or Windows 7.

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!

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:

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!