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!

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!

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!

So here’s another video for the V1… It’s pretty low-quality, but it shows how the V1 sounds when it’s not plugged in, that is to say, it doesn’t make real sounds.  We took this one a few days ago, but thought the other one was better quality.   We also tried to take one tonight, but the sound quality on that clip is amazingly horrible, so we’re not posting that one….

Thanks for watching!

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.