Kickstarter

Heyo,

I just wanted to let you know that I've finished the case design for Rockit and have made it available for order. I'm going to make sure that I get at least 50 people wanting the case before I put in an order. I expect that I'll get the cases in and shipped by February. Check it out:

Rockit Case

Cheers,

Matt

Thanks everybody for your support. This has been an exciting time for me and I'm really looking forward to the next phase of the project. You will be receiving your Rockit synth in the next couple months and I can't wait to see the response and see what you do with it. Just a reminder, If you're outside the U.S., please add $10 for international shipping.

As you might know, Kickstarter funding becomes available to me about 14 days after the end of the project, but I'm going to try to get things going before I receive the funding. The PCB and the BOM are finished, so I'll be ordering the production boards this week along with the components for the kits and finished units. The PCBs will take about 4 weeks to arrive, during which time I'll be putting together the kits. Hopefully, I'll have a lot of them put together by the time the boards arrive and be able to ship kits shortly thereafter. The software is fully functional; all features have been programmed. I'm going to be tweaking here or there but it's good enough at this point to be releasable. 

Interest in a case has been strong. I've pretty much decided not to do the Envision Plastics case because it reminds me too much of my crappy Lenovo Thinkpad at work. I'm leaning toward the acrylic route. I know it's derivative but there's a reason everyone has decided to do it. I don't have the mechanical chops to make something really nifty, but I have had some people express interest in helping me out on that end and I'm probably going to take them up on it. Once I've got the case figured out, I'll send out a note and make them available on my site. 

So, I'll keep sending updates here and on my blog about my progress toward shipping. Thanks again for your support!

I can't believe that it's the final week of the Kickstarter project. Big thanks to everyone for your support. It's a great feeling to have your hard work supported by so many people.

In honor of the final week, I made a new video to show you how far it's come since the project started. I think that you'll agree that the video demonstrates the effort I've put in to polishing the design. I've been able to vastly reduce harmonic distortion and drop the noisefloor way down. This comes through immediately with hugely improved clarity. I've also banished the aliasing monster to the nether reaches of the keyboard. I added some more wavetable playback methods including a white noise generator for general noise purposes and to be able to make the snappy snap of a snare drum (Hello, 808). I honestly sat for half an hour the other day working the filter on some white noise out of sheer joy hearing the sound. Anyways, check out the video and get excited!

After a fair amount of interest in a case, I put in some good time developing one. Before I pull the trigger and order a whole bunch, I want to get an idea of how many people will be interested in getting one. I know a lot of you will make your own case, but I'd like to provide an orderable option. My goal has been to keep the price down but as I was aware, a case is a decent cost adder to the design. So, the case will be made of black plastic. It'll be rectangular with white silkscreen. It's nothing crazy fancy but it'll be a decent box to hold the synth and keep it safe. I think it's going to look better than laser cut acrylic and be substantially cheaper than aluminum. The price will be $50 plus shipping. So, if you're interested in the case, post a comment, send me a message here, on the blog, or shoot me an email. I don't have pictures of this exact case at the moment because it's going to be specifically engineered once I commit to the order. I will have some pictures next week of some similar sample cases from the company that will make it, Envision Plastics. So, let me know what you think.

As you may know, this project is fully funded! I am excited. At this point, at least 100 Rockits will be headed out into the world. I can't wait to see what you're going to do with it. 

I'm still plugging away. I ironed out all the bugs in MIDI transmitting today, turning the Rockit synth into a very nifty MIDI controller. Not simply a synth, but an 18 knob(Master Volume is not digital) MIDI controller all wrapped up in one. Throw in the fact that the LFO can modulate a couple of the knobs and you have a MIDI automation pattern generator. Nice! I had a happy moment watching the automation in Live swinging around with my knob movements.

The last big thing to work on is the wavetable playback. There's a lot of fun to be had here. I'm going to standardize the wavetable structure so that it'll be easy for you to make your own wavetables. I might work on a program, MATLAB or otherwise, to automate the process and as a starting point for creating your own wavetables. There are also some interesting ways to play back wavetables that really spices up the sound. 

On the hardware side, the pcb layout is finished. I'm living with it for a couple days to make sure I'm happy and then I'll be ordering the preproduction prototypes. I'm 99% sure that'll be it and then I'll be placing the production order. Get ready!

Cheers

Matt