Beatbox by Rhythmo - DIY Cardboard MIDI Controller Kit

One Quick Add
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 09:12:30 PM

A few things that I forgot to mention:

1. We just sent out a final address lock notice to the email you provided for Kickstarter, and you have 2 days to change it. After which we'll be printing all the shipping labels, so you won't be able to change it past then. If you have moved over the past year, make sure you check the information we have on file and see if we have your correct address.

2. There are still 89 of you that didn't fill out the survey with your colorway choices and addresses. We sent out a final reminder email to you just now. You need to do this by December 10th or else you won't get your unit by Christmas. Also if you want to get your unit by Christmas you should only choose the OG colorway, since we only got enough of the other two colorways for everyone that filled out the survey.

Shipping!
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 01:10:50 PM

Hi all, got a lot of things to get through today. If you are in our Kickstarter backer Facebook group, chances are you already have a lot of this information, but here is everything so far:

For backers in the US and Canada, we are really close to shipping units out, like next week close. The inventory got to Texas for custom clearing on 11/30, and we were told by our custom broker that it'd take about a week to finish the process. Since we are located in Austin, we should get the inventory rather soon. We are hoping if everything is good, we should get the inventory in our office on 12/7-8. From the 8th to 15th, we'll be working on packing and shipping everything through UPS. We'll make sure all of these units get to your hands by Christmas. 

Our new online shop is also open at www.rhythmo.io, and if you want to grab an additional unit of the BeatBox for Christmas, place your order before 12/10 so we have time to process the orders. Keep in mind that we only have the OG colorway left.

There's a slight problem here though. the reason we only have OG's left for retail is because well, our box manufacturer basically didn't listen to our feedback last time on the color printed boxes needed more time to dry, since on our last small-batch test units, a lot of the colored boxes had paint smearing. Of course they didn't listen to us on this, and decided they can just change the printing process to mitigate this issue without telling us. Guess what, the issue wasn't mitigated and only about 60% of the colored boxes passed quality control. So we only got enough colored boxes (white and grey) for our backers shipped to us, which is why the colored boxes are listed as "backordered" on our site.

The issues don't end there. They also decided to make the white boxes with a glossier material, so the product ended up showing cardboard streaks. Our last test batch had these white boxes with a more matte finish, which was the intended look for this colorway. We still decided to get 100 units of these glossy units sent to us, so you don't have to wait anymore. If you ordered this white colorway and want to wait for the updated matte box, send us a direct message on Kickstarter/Indiegogo, otherwise we'll assume you want the glossy box as is. If you want to wait for the matte boxes though, they most likely won't deliver by Christmas.

Now for our international backers, your orders will be fulfilled with a separate inventory. This inventory will have all the colored box issues fixed (in fact they finishes the new white boxes last Tuesday), and will roll off of production on 12/8. After which we are sending them to our fulfillment partner in Hong Kong. Shipping timeline for these will be a very case-by-case thing though. Given the current international shipping situation, a lot of these orders probably won't arrive until after Christmas.

Back to our US backers, if you want to update your upgrade choices for the arcade buttons to the rubber domed OBSFE buttons we talked about in a previous update (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rhythmo/beatbox-by-rhythmo-diy-cardboard-midi-controller-kit/posts/2936801), you can order it on our secret backers only shop page: https://www.rhythmo.io/secret-shop . This is a password-protected page, and the password is backersonly . Here, if you have ordered the old button upgrade, you can choose to change it to this new button upgrade for $10. For everybody on iOS, we also have a Lightning to USB-B cable that you'd need. We just sourced these last month and they work 100% with the BeatBox. For our Kickstarter/Indiegogo backers, we are offering this for $8. You can also get this cable on Amazon for around $14. You can also go official Apple and get a Lightning Camera Adapter, but that's going to set you back $20+. 

If you ordered anything on this backers only shop page, make sure you put down your name, backer number, email and address used for Kickstarter/Indiegogo on the "add a note" section when you check out, otherwise the order won't be processed. Please make these changes by December 11th, afterwards this shop page will be closed.

These upgrade changes won't be accessible for our international backers, since we don't handle the fulfillment for you and can't really change that inventory at this point.

Anyways, that should be about it for now. Thank you for being a part of our journey this year. Let's hope that everything works out! Shipping during Christmas usually gets pretty crazy.

Finally about to ship!
about 4 years ago – Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 10:16:52 PM

Hey all, gonna be kind of a short update here since there's not much details to disclose, we just got this news earlier this week and we had to share this with you.

Our production process is finished! Pallets are gonna be loaded next Monday and will start shipping to us. We are working out some details on if we can afford getting a portion of it via air first, just so we can get these quicker, but given current situations international air freight can be super expensive. Ocean freight would take somewhere close to a month, so we should get these shipped out to you end of November at the latest.

Anyways, since we are super close to shipping now, we are gonna go ahead and lock all the orders and charge the cards we haven't charged. If you paid us on BackerKit via paypal, you have already been charged, but if you left your card info with us, we actually never charged the shipping and add-on costs, so we'll be charging those next week, keep an eye out.

That's about it, finally almost there!

Almost there! And some small hiccups along the process
about 4 years ago – Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 01:21:11 AM

To start off, we are almost done with production! Quality control testing started on Monday for all the circuit boards and the entire process should wrap up by the end of the month, or in worst case scenario, November 3rd. It's good to know that we won't be ruining anybody's holidays, or really our own holidays, imagine if we actually missed holiday season this year for sales.

We had a big emergency situation over the month, due to current international relations, there's been a shortage on microchips in China, since most microchips are made in the US. We put down deposits on our microchips back in July, only to find out in late September that the retailer sold what's supposed to be our inventory to someone else for a higher price. It was followed immediately by a week long holiday in China where no one was responding to anything.

Thankfully we found a solution to this, Atmel has another variant of the chip with the same exact pinouts but just with half the memory, from 128kb to 64kb, which is fine since our little firmware only takes up about 8% of the memory anyways. So yeah, crisis resolved. To think that this almost broke the entire production!

We had some footage of the hot swappable quality control rig they built to test out the boards quickly. Take a look!

In order to speed up the QC process, we actually wrote a little testing software. It's essentially a MIDI signal monitor but with a input checking UI to quickly see if all buttons are functional as intended. We thought this might be cool to share this with you since you could use this to test out the BeatBox after assembly to see if you hooked up all the wires correctly. Here's a temporary google drive link, until we put this up for downloads on our website.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tEav0_oe8JOQ3PNt-CRe69tO-WNUnX0_?usp=sharing

We will also put the final box die line in this link sometime later this week, just so some of you can get started on constructing your wooden box or what not. Do keep in mind though, you'd need material that's within ~1/8 inch thick, otherwise a lot of parts might not mount properly.

Speaking of box design, I know a lot of you have been anxious on the solid chassis upgrade. As we've talked about before, we couldn't get this started until the base unit was finalized, which was not too long ago. We just got our first mockup of the box, although it still needs some adjustments. Take a look:

The top of the case will be injection molded, and all other sides will be laser cut. We are still debating on if the sides should be clear since they do expose a lot of the internal wiring, which can kind of look messy. The top color also needs to be decided, although we are leaning towards a more neutral color like the grey shown here. What do you think? Also, if we stick with acrylic side panels, you can potentially glue them together with acrylic glue to enhance strength.

Last update we had some questions on speaker grills, and as you can see in the solid chassis pictures we've been looking into them. The sad news here is we can't actually find speaker grills on Amazon that would fit the BeatBox. Most retail speaker grills have a round housing, which would go over the height of the BeatBox. You can get 3 inch wide speaker grills without the housing, but at that point you won't have anything to secure these onto other than the cardboard box cutout being slightly smaller than the grills, which means any amount of wear and the grills can pop out, unless maybe if you superglue it onto the box. 

We found suppliers that can do custom 3 inch square grills that would fit, but then we'd have to import a certain amount, which we have no idea if they would sell or not. We'd probably have to gauge interest on this later.

A lot of you have been having trouble on ordering the rubber button upgrade, especially our Indiegogo backers, we literally couldn't find a way to help you update your order. What we'll be doing is this: we are constructing our webshop pages now, and for those of you that ordered the button upgrade, we'll give you a promo code before we ship the units to order the rubber buttons for $10, and let you include a comment on your backer info, then we can just note and substitute your choice of buttons when we ship.

We have shipped quite a few early production units to our early backers, if you are an early backer and haven't received emails from us, it could be one of the two reasons: 1. We are only shipping within the US at this time, we shipped two of these early production boxes internationally earlier this month and both got held up at customs, one of them shipped back to us due to the lack of certifications, and since this process can get pretty expensive, we are just not going to ship internationally until final units are out, and 2. we are out of the grey colorway, somehow within our early backers the grey was a LOT more popular than the other ones.

Anyways, that's about it, hopefully we'll start shipping on our next update!

September Update (huge news)
about 4 years ago – Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 12:40:47 AM

If you've been seeing our Instagram stories, you'd see we got our first batch of 50 units in this week. We immediately opened them up, assembled a few and tested them. Here's the first look:

So yeah, the idea here is after we set up the assembly line, we decided to do a smaller batch first to see if there's still any errors. This batch was finished about 2 weeks ago and we just got our hands on them. We've assembled a unit from all 3 colorways, and they look absolutely amazing:

We've never even seen production units for the white and grey colorways until now, and it really is a relief how great they look. All of the parts fit beautifully, and the units were all perfectly functional. 

Also, don't think we've mentioned this before, but there's a daisychain USB micro port on the BeatBox. You can connect either a USB drive for transferring/storing samples, or maybe hook up another MIDI device when we implement more keyboard friendly functionalities to our app. Thought it'd be handy since mobile devices only have one port. We've tested this, it works on devices that don't require a lot of power, like a USB thumb drive, but when it comes to our Samsung T5 portable SSD, it seems like the drive started but wasn't recognized by the mobile device. Could be a formatting issue, we'll have to look into it further.

You've also never seen the inside print on the box, have you? Here's a picture:

The manufacturer also included some rubber protectors for the very unusual 90 degree terminals we required for the arcade buttons (since the straight ones were too long and would interfere with the electrical modules in the box), it's a very nice touch. Not required, but is very neat if you want to eliminate all chances of error when performing. However, these take a long time to actually put on, and it just wouldn't be possible for the cable manufacturer to put all 48 of these protectors on per unit (I did this to one of the machines and it actually took me a whole half an hour of labor), which I don't really blame them for. Good that they are included in the box, and to be honest, you only need to put one of these on every two terminals, and that's not so bad.

We did notice some problems too with this first batch, mostly (or pretty much entirely) on the packaging. First of all, the guys in Shenzhen decided to add a lot more connection points to the preforation on the cutouts, to increase rigidity of the packaging, which we really didn't ask for. It was out of good intentions I suppose, but really made it impossible to remove these cutouts without a knife or something. That's not very acceptable. They've since fixed this. The vacuum injection molds inside also have slight imperfections with dimensions and they've adjusted this. These changes were finished two weeks ago.

One other issue we found is the white/grey boxes, since they were made with a smoother finish, need more time to let the print dry. Some of the units we got have slight smearing on the print, not really noticeable from a distance but if you are up close, you can still see them. Printing on cardboard without any blemishes is almost impossible though, we'll let these colors dry for a bit longer but there's still going to be inevitable slight imperfections on the final unit.

Anyways, we are SUPER excited to say we are really close to shipping at this point. As we've stated in the video, we'll be sending out some of the units from this batch to our first backers. One important note here is these are not entirely certified as a whole machine although the parts are, so this cannot be a point of sale, we are basically just sending you a gift for supporting us on Kickstarter. The outside carrying case also won't have the final prints on it, although it won't really affect use. So yeah, if you are like, backer 1-50 or something and you are interested in getting one of these, keep an eye out!