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

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!

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:

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!

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.

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?

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!

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: