Beatbox by Rhythmo - DIY Cardboard MIDI Controller Kit

Quick Button Update
over 3 years ago – Sat, Aug 29, 2020 at 03:59:32 AM

We made a quick video on the button choices and comparisons!

Just to recap:

We are going to lock BackerKit orders on the button upgrade by next Friday, September 4th, since Sanwa needs a bit of lead time to actually produce the buttons. If you have already locked your orders and wish to change them, send us a message and we'll take care of it.

The stock buttons have a Seimitsu style switch with a Sanwa style body. They feel really good, but overall the plastic quality is a bit worse than the Sanwa buttons. If you want to repurpose the buttons a lot, then the upgrade would make sense since the plastic housing would survive much longer.

The old Sanwa quiet buttons we offer (OBSFS) are basically just their normal buttons with a foam damper inside. You can keep it in or take it out for the clicky feel. When the dampers are installed, they are really quiet but the actuation feels mushy. These will come in the colorway chosen for your BeatBox.

The new Sanwa quiet buttons (OBSFE) are from a new product line, featuring rubber domes. These buttons are a lot more advanced since they are quiet but still retain the normal feedback. They also cost $10 more, $40 for the set since they run about 55 yen more per button for us, but overall our offering is still cheaper than any other US retailers ($47.2 if you got them at focusattack). They also only come in the grey/white set, and going forward we are only going to be offering this set as upgrades, since the foam damper line is actually discontinued by Sanwa for being overall an inferior product.

Also, pro tip, if it's only the quietness you are after, you could grab foam dampers by themselves for less than $5 for the set from focus attack. Do this at your own risk since the buttons might not actuate properly. Link below:

https://focusattack.com/silencer-sanwa-seimitsu-30mm-foam-washers-pack-of-8/

August Update
over 3 years ago – Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 02:23:17 AM

Tl;dr: The wait is almost over! We’ve gotten confirmation that the production will finish mid-September, the 26th at the latest. After which the US orders will come straight to us, and we’ll be distributing those ourselves, whereas orders from the rest of the world will have to be shipped directly from Shenzhen after we clear all the certifications.

Anyways, this past month has been a pretty smooth sail. We officially went into production around 2 weeks ago, and we’ve been working on fixing all the little issues with firmware. We talked about the difficulty to get access to the firmware codes in our last update, and after a decent amount of negotiations we finally got it, so we finally were able to play around with the codes and get the best results possible. After all, I’m an avid finger drummer (pretty sure most of y’all got onto this project after seeing me finger drumming) and I can tell the sensitivity and responsiveness of the buttons better than the guys overseas.

After testing with a few sets of buttons, we settled at a 2ms delay per loop. 1ms was enough for most buttons, including the silent Sanwa OBSFE buttons we are offering as an upgrade, but with foam dampers installed in the Sanwa buttons (a popular mod from Focus Attack, really eliminates any noise but shortens the button travels a lot, you lose a lot of the button feedback so probably not the greatest for finger drumming), you’d need an extra 1ms of delay. This delay doesn’t affect finger drumming performance at all, it’s barely noticeable as most DAWs usually already have a ~10ms delay, even with ASIO drivers. Here’s me doing some machine gun hats with the current setup: 

And here's a video for comparison of the old firmware with misinput:

Speaking of the silent Sanwa buttons, we were talking to Sanwa last month regarding finalizing the orders and they informed us that they quoted us the wrong amount. We were quoted at 125 yen per button, which apparently was for their normal clicky buttons. The silent OBSFE variant (they are the best thing ever, trust me, even MIDI fighter only offers the clicky version since they only make these quiet ones at 30mm, not 24mm) actually cost 180 yen, which would cost us $27 for 16 buttons, we only charged $30 for the entire upgrade, with shipping and packing overheads we’d be making just about nothing. Couldn’t complain about this much since we never actually finalized the deal with Sanwa, we were waiting for the actual production numbers to finalize. Anyways, we decided to take this hit and order these OBSFE buttons, these buttons are perfect for finger drumming and as a finger drummer myself, I need my backers to have the best parts available. They have all the tactile feedback and a much reduced noise level, since instead of simply dampening the buttons, they actually came up with an entirely different button assembly to avoid the buttons from bottoming out. Instead of using a plastic dome, these buttons have a rubber dome, the top of the dome using a harder, polished rubber that feels like plastic (I honestly couldn’t even tell that it was rubber until I took one apart) and the bottom using a squishier rubber to eliminate the noise. The rubber walls are also a touch longer than the plastic ones to avoid full bottoming out. These buttons are great since they retain all the actuation distance and feedback, unlike other silent buttons with foam dampers. The foam dampeners can end up feeling a little mushy. In short, they are quieter but retain all of the satisfying arcade button clicks. The only catch is that we're only able to offer them in one colorway. 

Here's a picture of the colorway seen on our prototype of the BeatBox:

Here's a video of the rubber dome:

And here's a comparison of the plastic dome (L) and the rubber dome (R):

Lastly, here's a side by side photo:

We also had to make some changes on our stock button choice. Our sourcing partner initially decided to use these more tactile, louder buttons that they could find, and we recently decided to look into it ourselves. Turns out, there are two major manufacturers for arcade button microswitches in China, one is more tactile with the spring plate we talked about in our past update, and one is more linear, quieter, faster actuation, close to a SANWA clone. As a finger drummer myself, I prefer the quick responsiveness of the linear buttons, but this isn’t an actual difference in quality, since some people in the arcade fighting game world do prefer the more tactile buttons. They claim these buttons are less likely to have misinputs since they are harder to press down, and generally feel more secure. But then in the finger drumming standpoint, doing quick hi hats on firm buttons would be very tiring. We decided to do this last minute change on button choices and opted for the more linear buttons.

Here's a video showing the linear buttons that we went with (red) and the tactile button (white): 

Our guys in Shenzhen made some improvements to the packaging and chassis as well. The original design of the chassis had a two layer faceplate, one stronger outer packaging material for the outside and a weaker cardboard on the inside; they updated this to use the outer packaging material for both layers for stronger build quality. The outer packaging was also updated to have two boxes instead of two cardboard divider pieces. Take a look:

Anyways, we are almost at the finish line, thank you for your continuing support and we are very excited to see what you can make with the BeatBox!

Update and some behind the scenes happenings
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 03:04:45 PM

Hi guys! Thank you for caring about this product and for reaching out to us. There’s been a lot of going back and forth with negotiations and a lot of the information was unclear, so we had to wait til we had some definitive answers. Without further ado, we have another update for you!

 The TLDR version of this is we are close to the end, most actual hardware problems are fixed, some slight firmware codes should be tweaked but those are easy fixes, we are pretty much ready for the certification/mass production phase, parts are being gathered as we speak.

 In this update, we’re going to go over some of the reasons we’ve been facing delays and some new timeline adjustments. We still stand by delivering the best version of the product, but that means we’ve had to reconsider some manufacturing choices. We also have had some changes in our development team that are addressed further down. Long update, sit tight.

Some good news to kick this off with: we received the new version of the amplifier boards on July 3rd and after a week of testing, we are now pretty confident with these boards. All the major problems from our previous updates are fixed.

One major problem with the previous units we received was the audio quality. To recap, with the same exact speakers, previous units were producing subpar audio quality compared to 3rd party amps, mostly because the manufacturer was trying to avoid redrawing the circuit and chose to solve the idle noise problem by cutting power delivery, which is just not acceptable. This time the audio received a huge improvement. With the same exact speakers, the audio level is about 50% louder at the same volume dial position, sub-bass is clearly audible on properly mixed tracks, and since they reworked the sound card circuit, the grounding issue is resolved, which means no more noise. Check the video below for comparison:

Here are some pics of the boards:

Again, if we were using subpar parts to begin with, we would have accepted a subpar result; but if it’s purely a design issue, we just wouldn’t be able to accept the cut in quality. Basically what we are trying to say is that the wait made some sense. Most of the struggle went into getting the designers to admit that there was a problem to begin with. The full power delivery does have a slight draw back, when the battery level is below ~25% and overly bass-y tracks are played at full volume, the battery might drop below the low voltage protection threshold, shutting the unit down until it’s plugged into the wall. This should be a pretty rare occurrence though, during normal tests at full volume we never encountered this issue until we looked up “bass challenge” type of tracks. Plus, you probably have bigger problems to worry about when blasting bass at full volume, like a blown speaker.

There was some complication with the battery choice. During our initial negotiations and planning the manufacturer insisted that we use the 3rd party aftermarket battery that we’ve been using in our own prototypes, since they have the certifications required for exporting and would be a more “economical choice”. This is really only the case if we only produce one batch of product, which isn’t gonna be the case. We kept asking for a breakdown and comparison of costs between this aftermarket battery and a customized 18650 battery pack with certifications and didn’t get anything, so we had to go talk to the battery supplier we previously had connection with, and we got quoted about $5 less per battery even with the certification costs. Seems little, but it’s actually pretty significant given our margins.

With the new boards there are some ghosting issues, first with the buttons. We added diodes to fix the multi-press issue we had before, which fixed the issue, but now for some reason the buttons are getting registered a lot quicker. With stock buttons there’s no issue, since they have a longer, clickier actuation, but with our SANWA button upgrades, especially if you get silent foam dampers from Focus Attack (great add-on btw, they sell them for like $1.5 for 4 dampers), the actuation distance is greatly reduced, resulting in occasional ghost clicks. Easy problem to fix, all it would take is increasing the round delay from 5ms to somewhere around 7-8ms so a single click wouldn’t be registered twice.

We took a video to show you guys. You'll see that there's a point where 4 snares are triggered when it was only pressed 3 times meaning one of them was a ghost trigger. You can even hear the in button sounds that it was pressed just 3 times if you listen closely.

The joystick has another ghosting issue. When the box is closed and the joystick connection cable gets pressure, it sometimes sends out MIDI signals even when it’s not moved. We noticed that most of the time, the MIDI channel signal isn’t even changed, it just keeps repeating the same MIDI value with an on signal. This isn’t an issue with our mobile app since no MIDI value is actually changed, but it makes it impossible to map this controller to a 3rd party app, Ableton for example, since the 3rd party app would constantly detect an ON signal from your joystick. Easy issue to fix as well, the joystick returns a value between 0 to 1024, and we are dividing it by 8 to get the 0 to 127 MIDI value. Our old source code only returned an ON signal once 1 full step on the MIDI signal was changed, which is 8 steps on the joystick; but it seems like now the joystick is sending out an ON signal when it detects any slight change. Changing this threshold back to 1 full MIDI step would fix the problem, or if not, adding a buffer to MIDI value changes when the joystick is centered will surely fix everything. 

We tried to shoot a video on this yesterday but couldn’t reproduce this issue, it only happens very occasionally, but we have seen it happen. We took the video below showing the issue to send to our manufacturers, but since we weren't taking the video to include in an update we didn't show how the joystick wasn't moving.

Now this is where we ran into some arguments. Like we talked about in our previous updates, we didn’t really have a professional electrical engineer on board, so a lot of our designs weren’t up to manufacturer specifications. Our solution was to let our manufacturer redesign the product, and they developed their own source code, which undeniably solved a lot of the hardware problems from before (knob velocity, joystick accuracy, battery level indication, etc.). When we asked them for this source code to tweak the ghosting issues, however, they were very reluctant to provide it, saying the source code wasn’t included in our design contract (which, I admit, I made the mistake to assume it was included). They wanted to make a new batch of boards with updated source codes loaded in and send me the new boards, which is just a horrible idea: building the boards would take a week, sending them another week (plus a few hundred bucks in international UPS shipping), a total of two weeks, and if the changes weren’t enough, they’d have to do this again and delay the process by another two weeks, whereas if we had the source code this is a fix that’d take no longer than a few hours.

We learned their motives after some lengthy negotiations. Basically, the constant reworks and delays made them suffer a loss from this product design (which if y’all listened to all the product specs and worked the sound card circuit properly we wouldn’t have this problem now WOULD WE), and they were afraid they wouldn’t make their money back if they give us the source code and we decide to just manufacture the units with someone else. They basically assumed we were only going to produce one batch of the product with them and this is the only chance they can make their money, so all of their decisions revolved this single motive, from trying to deploy easy workarounds to not factoring battery certification costs into the long run, to trying to hide the source code and design from us for the time being, which made us pretty speechless. We had to talk to them to realign our goals, assured them that we wouldn’t have the capacity to do any supply chain management for a good while, and there’s longevity in the product (multiple major retailers are waiting on sample units from us, for god’s sake) so by not including us in the design process, they are just slowing down the whole process, which creates more loss for the both of us, makes sense for nobody. Anyways, as a result, we’ve agreed to sign the initial bulk order contract with them now and give them the deposit, and they’ve agreed to give us all the design files, and start production while getting certifications. Given the situation, we should start to see the first shipments within 1-2 months, so this time we are finally close to the finish line.

Now with the home front. We’ve recently had some pretty significant changes to our team. The two interns who had been working on it in the office are moving on to their full time jobs and projects, and our two remote developers (really talented people, btw) haven’t had the most reliable schedule. As a result our app development schedule has been a bit slower than expected. We brought on a full-time developer earlier this month, so the progress is back on, but unfortunately there are certain features that we don’t think would make the product release. All of the essential features we’ve showcased so far, including button triggers, sample library, cloud access, 16 step sequencer and sampler will be included, the main missing features are effects, mixing (will only have channel volumes for now), and sequencer pattern arrangement. These features, as well as some other flares are being developed and will be released in the future via app updates, but we just don’t have enough time to have them all stable with this initial release.

If you’ve gotten this far, and are still with us, thank you! As you might have known, Texas has become quite the COVID-19 central, and we are unsure when we’ll be back together in office, but one thing remains true: we are dedicated to bring you the best product we can build. The BeatBox has been a dream come true for the team, and we couldn’t have possibly done it without your support, so there’s absolutely no way we’ll let any subpar result leave the assembly line.

Thank you for your patience and persistence. Let us know if you have any questions. Almost there!

Update (or mostly a rant at this point)
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 12:14:40 AM

Note: this was originally going to be a full video, but my lav mic setup ran out of battery half way through, so none of the footage was usable, and I wasn’t going to spend another 2 hours trying to struggle through talking into the camera. I am so bad at talking into the camera that every line literally takes me 5 tries to get right. Most of this post was the script I wrote for this video anyways, so the information remains the same.

As some of you may know from our Instagram stories, we received 5 of the updated test units from Shenzhen about 3 weeks ago, and we've been testing them out. You saw the little performance just now featuring the slicer functionality, and while it might seem like everything is working fine, there are quite a few things we need to talk about. Let's go over the good stuff first.

The new box chassis feature a brand-new print design with construction project inspired elements. Our manufacturer has warned us that with cardboard packaging, it’s pretty difficult to have all the print locations precise, which in addition to the appearance issue, could be problematic since there are important button and connection labels on the machine. We adjusted the print design to avoid any loss on labels due to print imperfections, and as you can see, although all of our units have slight imperfections on prints, for example the print on this sample box is shifted by about 1 mm (you can really notice it round the knobs, they are supposed to be in the middle of the two lines, but they clearly go over the bottom border), all of the labels are still clearly shown. And although there are slight imperfections on prints, overall, these turned out almost better than I expected.

This updated box design also made parts fit a lot better than our original prototype, so the assembly process also became smoother. I had shown this to a friend of mine that’s had very little experience in DIY work, and she was able to assemble the whole unit in around 50 minutes, which is definitely an improvement over our previous test results. All of the cuts fit a lot nicer, and there are no longer bulges and holes due to cutout design. The box now also has less intrusive battery and mode LED cutouts, definitely a huge improvement over the first test unit they sent over, you can read our last blog post for comparison.

One huge concern was the manufacturer warned us that they weren’t able to replicate the exact cardboard material we’ve used in our prototype units, so the strength of the box would be compromised to an extent, which my response was well, that’s not ok. But I’m glad to say that these new units with the support structure underneath are still pretty rigid, even when you hit the buttons with considerable force, the box doesn’t budge, so very reassuring to say the least. You can see this from the video at the top of the post.

  Now with the good stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the problems. Our original board design had each button taking up a pin on the microcontroller, which isn’t the most efficient approach, but effective. They had updated this board design to include a button matrix, so instead of having the buttons take up 24 pins, they now take 4 rows + 6 columns, 10 pins. This is the correct approach, but they forgot to add a direction on the currents, so now when you activate 3 corner buttons in a rectangle grid, the 4th corner automatically activates. Let me show you what I mean. Pay attention to what I'm pressing and what buttons are being triggered.

  This takes a simple fix of adding diodes on the connections, which keyboard manufacturers have been doing for decades. Definitely a silly problem from the start, and I have received updated board diagrams that indicate the inclusion of diodes to fix this problem.

  Speaking of silly problems, we have specified that we wanted all the circuit boards to be printed in our fonts and graphics. We asked them if they wanted instructions and fonts to use themselves, which they’ve refused to do so themselves since they apparently weren’t comfortable using custom fonts or follow any instructions, so I proposed to do the entire print file on our end, and have them transfer the entire print to these boards. That’s exactly what we did, I sent over complete print files for the entire board for them to literally drag and drop onto the board, which they decided to redo themselves anyway, making our attempt to design the board print completely useless. As you can see here with the misprints for brain module, brrin mooule, could be misprints could be ancient forbidden scripts, I don’t know, and they somehow butchered the icons we created too, which I have no idea why. I had to ask them what specific process they utilized to print these boards, they replied to me they used the exact 1:1 ratio to print these boards, which I replied with this exact comparison and said, what does 1:1 ratio mean to you? Anyways, we did another version of this print file and we made them send over a final confirmation on the prints this time, so it should be good.

 Now the most important problem. We talked about the noise issue from ground loops last time, and they sent over a video indicating idle noise is eliminated. The rabbit hole goes deeper though. The BeatBox, when powered on without connecting its USB cable, functions as a generic line-in speaker, through the microphone input. We called our line-in port a mic input, and the line-out port a headphone output, so we can label them with simple icons, which was apparently very confusing. The manufacturer was fixated on the port being used with actual microphones, and started asking me all these questions regarding input audio levels, since line-in audio is about 30 dbs louder than microphone input. I told them this will never be the case, when the BeatBox is used as a speaker, there’s only going to be line-in input, and even when it’s connected to the app, the mic input will mostly be used for line-in audio for sampling, in rare cases when an actual microphone is used, we will use the app to bump up the final audio level. Somehow, someway, they messed this up again and took away the entire line-in speaker functionality, saying I told them the unit would never be connected to a microphone when USB is not plugged in.

So now let’s talk about what they actually did to “eliminate” the noise. Instead of properly grounding things, I suspect they just dropped the voltage level feeding into the amplifier, making it overall quieter so you can’t hear the speaker idle noise. This is basically useless now, since they took away the entire line-in speaker function. When the BeatBox is hooked up to the mobile device, however, the soundcard noise from improper grounding still exists, which was a problem we pointed out to them the first time. So basically, the only functionality left on the box still has this noise problem. Another side effect of this workaround fix is that both the audio level and quality took a hit. This version of the box is about 40% quieter than the first version they sent over, and the bass is completely lost. Audio level dial curve was also affected, the first 50% of the curve is barely audible and all of the audio increase happens at the last 20%. This is absolutely unacceptable and I had to have lots of lengthy calls, some extended into 5am, with lots of shifting blames and me having to do AB testing to call their bluff. For example, they kept claiming the soundcard noise isn’t a solvable issue because the board is more than a USB soundcard, by routing the soundcard through the USB hub on board, extra noise is introduced. I got this USB soundcard here and I plugged it into one of the idle USB ports I soldered onto this board, and guess what? No noise. Then they got a representative from the soundcard chip factory on the phone, and he understandably got defensive instantly saying their chips don’t have issues, which I said I know, I used another USB soundcard which uses a similar chip as what you guys make, the problem isn’t in the chip, but the layout on the board, stop trying to shift blames and work around the issue, just redraw the board connections and we can all get along. Obviously redrawing the connections would involve work and they are just avoiding this.

^Note: It's really difficult to show the audio level accurately from a microphone, but trust me, the problem is there. First 50% of the knob sounds about as loud as a phone speaker, and from 80-100% the audio goes up dramatically. I also tried to make a video showing the audio quality loss, but that's just impossible to show on video. It is significant in person though.

Anyways, after about a week of heated battle, they have now made another version of the boards and are sending them over. I know for a fact the button trigger problem was fixed, but let’s see how the audio quality turns out. I wouldn’t have a problem with subpar audio quality if we were using cheaper speakers, but if the same speakers can sound way better on other soundcards and amplifiers, and all the quality loss was from subpar work on board design, it’s absolutely not acceptable. To be fair, I have shown this unit to a couple of my friends that are not producers, and they all thought it sounded fine. It’s hard to notice the difference without comparison, and I was only able to notice it because I’ve played around with our own various prototypes for about two years. I've mentioned this before, but the original plan was for me to fly over around February to monitor the process, which would have eliminated half of the delay here, but that plan totally fell through.

And a little bit of self-reflection: one huge problem we've had within the company was we never had a reliable, professional electrical engineer. Our knowledge in DIY electronics was enough for us to make prototypes to prove the concept, but we had to rely on the manufacturer to actually consolidate the circuit designs for production purposes, which also contributed to a lot of the problems.

All the frustration aside, we should be receiving 5 sets of these new boards next week. Hopefully this time we get it right and we don’t have to expect further delays.

Some good news on the home front regarding app development: slicer function, as you've seen in the short demo on top, works very well now. We've also been developing an animated assembly manual in the app for you to follow step by step. Here are some of the animations:

^Oh, btw, say hi to Mac, our assembly instructor. Anyways, we'll update you once we've tested out the new boards. Until then!

Quick Update
almost 4 years ago – Thu, May 14, 2020 at 07:43:58 AM

Hey all, hope everybody is doing well. Usually I like to make updates when I have all the information on hand, but since we've gone past our last expected shipping date of May 6th, thought I should make an update now.

To help you understand this update better, I'll explain on the structure with our partners in China. So, we have a supply chain management/electrical engineering partner in Shenzhen, and they basically handle all the supplier relations, sourcing, designing and manufacture compliance for us. They have to deal with all of the part suppliers, packaging company, certification agencies and such. They facilitate parts to the assembly guys, and then to the packaging guys, then at the end of the process they'll send the product to warehouses we rent spaces of. That way, we only need to have one point of contact, a reliable one at that.

Basically, what I didn't understand at the time was that May 6th was basically referring to the case where I approved the last test unit we received, and as you know there's been some problems with the unit,  most importantly the ground loop noise. They also didn't quite understand the idea of a DIY electronic product, and insisted on marking the PCB boards very factory-friendly, meaning there's lots of component marks on the board that'd make it very hard to read for our users. Had to go back and forth a few times and redesign all the PCB prints.

Another big problem was the box body prints. Last unit we received didn't have any prints since it would have taken a long time to get the packaging company to make a single unit of the box. The packaging company evaluated our print design and basically, they have never encountered this idea of using the packaging as a product chassis, so we had to work on that. The problem here is they were concerned with the box cutting accuracy, and since a lot of our part labeling are within 5mm of a cutting outline, they were afraid that things might not show perfectly. This really isn't acceptable on our end, since the bigger problem is inaccuracy in chassis cut would mean that the product might not assemble well. Also, they weren't able to replicate the exact same material we used for our prototypes (the ones you've seen in our Kickstarter video), so they'd have to use other cardboard that'd feel pretty close to what we used. Our boxes were made by this small packaging company in Dallas for rapid iteration purposes, and for obvious pricing reasons we can't keep using those guys for the final product.

Given the above problems, we decided to ask for another batch of test units, this time with the final packaging. As you can see here the noise issue seems to be fully solved, as the microphone isn't picking up any waveform against the speaker.

We asked for 4 units this time to have a reasonable sample size so we know if the slight inaccuracy in packaging cuts would affect the assembly process. Even with the guys in Dallas, when we ordered 20 boxes, about half of them had slight inaccuracies here and there, but it didn't really affect the assembly at all, so hopefully this is still going to be the case here. The four units were finished last week, and they should be on their way over this week. Here are some very low quality photos of the units (these guys need to get better phones, seriously)

As you can see, these units have our new construction inspired print design implemented. We had them assemble one of the units and apparently they didn't run into any accuracy problems. From the photos it seems like canvas wrap material looks pretty close to our prototype units.

We also took this chance to implement some other changes. The last unit we received had these large 5mm bulbs for the battery indication, and I'll be honest here, I broke one of the bulbs within the first teardown. It was functioning just right when I received the unit but went out pretty quick. You can see it in the update video:

I suspected that the bulb connection probably touched something else since this is a throughhole part. Also these bulbs were way too big and on the unit they seem very intrusive, see below:

So this time we changed it to small surface mount lights, which are just a lot less prone to failure and look so much better. We also found that the arcade button connection legs extended out too far and would interfere with the circuit boards, so we had the part supplier change them to a 90 degree bend for shorter distance.

But yeah, to avoid further confusion, I'll update the shipping date once I finish evaluating this batch, so I don't have to disappoint y'all again. The problem here is now that we are dealing with multiple actual suppliers and their lead times, making new iterations of the product takes so much longer. This time it took over a month to actually coordinate all these changes. The actual production cycle we got quoted on these units is actually pretty shorter, within a month, since by my design most of the parts in the box are just off-the-shelf parts with readily available suppliers, no special assembly line required, so there's barely any lead time, it's mostly a sourcing game.

I know a lot of you might be confused as of why we are taking so long on finetuning the product since in the Kickstarter video it seemed like the product was already ready to go on shelf. That's really because I'm a really good crafter and I can make things look pretty good with my limited knowledge and abilities. It should be pretty clear that we are a very new startup company, I mean, most of the project was developed by me in my garage during gradschool. It's really not like we just have a lot of units stashed up somewhere. A lot of our prototype parts, like the amplifier, were finished components that we got off of Amazon, and most of the boards didn't have all the intended functionalities (none of our prototypes had the soundcard built-in since I couldn't really design a whole amplifier+soundcard board). The prototypes were only a proof of concept so we can show the idea to early adopters, and only had essential functionalities. So for manufacturing purposes, we actually had to redesign all the electrical components, which is where we spent the majority of the past half a year on, other than pulling additional equity funding for the company (which, thanks to the support from y'all, was very easy since we could prove market interest). Now that we are dealing with a bunch of actual suppliers, I'm starting to learn that there are a lot more uncertainties when you have so many parties involved, especially when most of them are very unfamiliar with the product concept.

Another reason why this is taking time is that we are really paying attention to details here. As you have probably seen from social media ads we ran last year, although a lot of people liked the idea of the BeatBox, there were a lot of skeptics. Musical instruments have been traditionally perceived as a high-barrier, serious thing, and our concept definitely somehow offended a lot of "serious musicians". What they didn't understand was instead of a cheap amateur piece of equipment, the BeatBox is more of a well thought-out, fun activity that hopefully draw people into the world of creation, minus all the pretentiousness. But yeah, in order to deliver this fun experience, we need to make sure the entire product lives up to our expectations, hitting all the details right while being a cheap product. We could have just approved the last unit and gotten our shipment now, but we needed to make sure the final product is something both us and you could be proud of, so we had to get another iteration done. I won't be able to ship out something that I'm not 100% happy with.

Phew, didn't expect to actually write this much. Anyways, once I test the units out I'll give you a more in-depth video explaination.