case design updates

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Progress is slow but definitely still happening. Along with determining if silicone buttons are doable, I’ve been working on how I can produce cases at home instead of farming them out, or having to get up to techshop and the serious hassle that is to get time in on the laser. My CNC router has been put to hard labor and here are some of the preliminary results:

here’s an early test. many things wrong.

Here’s the results of about 3 tests later. Much closer. I’ve solved some of the hardest problems, now I just need to get a workflow going and I think I’ll be in good shape.

And then here’s the latest test of a new (to me) product from Smooth-on that has a much firmer feel than the test results we showed at Maker Faire Bay Area 2010.

And here’s how they look in this newest prototype case:

My camera (soon to be my *old* camera) somewhat exaggerates the brightness, but it’s still very readable.

I wasn’t able to de-gas the silicone, and it really really needs that to achieve the water-clear property it’s capable of, however, the bubbles serve as a very effective diffuser of the LED light from underneath. The only drag is that while I was able to get relatively few big bubbles in the casting, there were still some. Degassing would solve that, but it would be almost a thousand dollars in new machinery to do that. So I’m not sure if this is the direction I want to go in, but it’s a possibility. Testing it out has helped to at least answer the questions in my head about whether this is something we *should* do. The answer is still “Hmmmmm I dunno yet” but at least now that’s because we can try using the prototype and see how it performs. Maybe it will be an option we offer.

Announcements • Roxor 2.6

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hey there. So Apple rolled out a new version of Java 6, and it appears to have solved the problems of it not letting compiled processing apps to launch. So! this is really good news because there are a ton of now deprecated setup steps that you can replace with just making sure system update has run and you have the latest java installed.

go get it here: http://beatseqr.com/downloads/roxor2_6.app.zip

Statistics: Posted by stevecooley — Wed Jun 09, 2010 1:51 pm

v3.2 circuit boards are on order

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pending any kind of hold my board house may have for my order, I’m expecting a new small batch of boards to arrive in a couple of weeks. There are a couple of changes that I hope will translate to improvements.

1. the older style potentiometers that required headers, wiring, and holes drilled through the circuit board are now replaced by pcb-mount style potentiometers. I’ve tried really hard to get it right, so I’m hoping I did.

2. fader mounting holes are resized to be the correct size… or.. a better size. I’d made an error on the v3.1 boards in forgetting to fix the problem I saw on the v3 boards. So they should go in easy peasy now.

3. mounting holes are going to be fabricated by the board house. It took me a while to figure out that I can get them to do that for me. 🙂 The net result is that a significant amount of work will be reduced to a couple of machining operations once I get the boards. The cost to get them to do the final machining operations was far outweighed by my ability to do it on my bandsaw in no time.

4. Electrical testing. This extra board house option will further increase my confidence in the product I sell. I could test the boards myself, but I’d rather be working on more creative things. I figured it was best to leave this important step up to people who are experts at quality control.

Price Updates

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I have beatseqr v3.1 unassembled kits available. The assembly is pretty straight forward, with only a couple of weird things you’ll need to do to undo some of the issues I’m reworking for the next version, whenever that ends up being. This version works, and aside from some slightly inconvenient assembly steps, it’s relatively easy work.

Fully built and battle tested with hard acrylic keys, acrylic case & knobs, $349
Kit with arduino mega, $249
Kit with NO arduino mega, $199

kit prices do not include buttons, case, knobs, or cables. contact steve@beatseqr.com for more info.