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!

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!

So we’re starting to get circuit boards printed up, and frankly, we don’t need a bunch of circuit boards lying around.  What we do need is testers.  An ideal tester for us would be someone with at least basic soldering knowledge, and the ability to program AVR microcontrollers, either through In-System Programming or via regular serial or parallel programming.  If you’re interested in getting an at-or-below cost kit from us to build your own OpenChord guitar, please contact us at develop@openchord.org!

So, I should probably just have gone and gotten a new camera, but after struggling with things for a week or two, I’ve finally gotten some videos taken and edited so the sound doesn’t sound TOO bad.

Here, we’re showing off the ability of the V1 to practice chords -

And here’s a a video showing off how you can map individual notes and scales to the guitar -

Although we don’t show it (since we got that code working after we took the video…), there’s another fret combination (first 3 strings on the 4th and 5th frets) that allows you to change between the original “play with the frets” mode, chord mode, and notes mode.

There’s still some updating of the software we’d like to do, since right now, you can re-assign the chords or notes that you play as color buttons, but they reset to the default when you restart the controller.  It shouldn’t be difficult, but right now, we’re using 97.7% of the current chip’s memory, so we’re going to have to upgrade our hardware first.  Still, that’s just a simple swapping of a better chip, so things are coming along!

A clarifying note – While we left it plugged in to the amp in this video to demonstrate how it’s both a real guitar and a working controller, if you unplug the guitar, you don’t really hear it, and if the slight sound is still too much, you can just tap the pick against the strings instead of a full strum.  You see that happen in the first few notes that are hit in the video..  Yeah, what an embarrassing mistake!

Anyhow, we’ve got a new video up on the blog, and we’ll try to have a more in-depth video up soon.

We finally got a video taken!  We’re still offering the Beta Version of the V1 for $169; for more information, check out the ‘Buy’ page.

So after another month of no news, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve finally been able to get the V1 to work with the Nintendo Wii®!  We’ve tested it with Rock Band® 2 and Guitar Hero World Tour®, and so far, it seems to work perfectly. Also, the design has been updated to allow you to use the guitar like you would any other electric guitar.

We’ll be trying to get a video up in another few days, along with instructions for you to build your own.  It’s a little more complicated now, since we’ve switched from the Arudino to just the raw ATMega AVR microcontrollers, but not too much more complicated. Mostly, just more soldering..

Also, we’re now offering a beta version of the V1 for Wii® to buy! For $169,  you’ll get one of the very first OpenChord.org controllers, suitable for both guitar games and playing real music.  As is our philosophy, with any of our products, you’ll also be buying the right to buy any future upgrades at the cost of materials, so if and when we upgrade the guitar, you’ll be able to send us a message and we’ll help you make sure your guitar remains top-of-the-line.  Check out more details on the “Buy” page, or e-mail us at buy@openchord.org.

*cough*

So I’m an idiot, and wrote this all up a few weeks ago, but forgot to actually post it.

For the past week or two, this is a little something that we’ve been working on-

The OpenChord.org L-Series

The OpenChord L Series.

This project is an easier, simpler version of the V1, and it converts the Ashely Rock Axe guitar into a stringed instrument by modifying only the neck. It’s a project that takes fewer supplies, no string-insulation, and stays looking good fairly easily. Also, it doesn’t require 2 guitars. In the next couple of days, we’ll be posting instructions on Instructables.

Oh, and with the L-Series, we’re going to be making some significant updates to the code, the biggest being the start of a project to do more advanced things with note-recognition. Basically, we’ll be looking into settings that will let you map notes and chords to guitar hero buttons, so for example, if you finger a C-chord, the controller will register that as the Green button, and so on. Or map the buttons to a scale, so you can play Guitar Hero or Rock Band and actually be practicing chord changes and scales.

Also, other big news on the technical front. While the L-Series will be using the Arduino microcontrollers, we’re shifting the rest of the line over to the Atmel AVR processors. For more information about this switch and the reasoning behind it, check out the Developent page.

As of today, the OpenChord V1 is ready to rock. Instead of playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band with a controller that simply looks like a guitar, you can now play on the real deal – moving your fingers along the strings of a real guitar, making real chords. Which makes playing so, so much more rewarding.