Microband goes live

One of the reasons there's not been much hardware activity is because we've been coding away like a troupe of monkeys to get the instrument software (and accompanying website) if not finished, at least in a state that we can use to demonstrate the instruments.

We're calling the range "MicroBand"

(micro because they're small, but also because they're driven by Microchips micro-controllers. You really couldn't get more micro than one of our micro instruments!)

The software uses an Activex DLL to raise events whenever the instrument is played. This allows us to concentrate on getting everything working, then handing a large part of it over to the community to play about with and see what they can come up with!

When a micro instrument is connected, the DLL raises a connected event, reads some data off the device and displays it as an interactive animation on the screen

(the onscreen guitar highlights which fret the user has selected at any time the instrument is held and played properly - note how the onscreen display changes to match the instrument you're holding)

The software includes a sequencer, so multiple players can collaborate on a single song. In the example below, another user has already laid down a drum track (red) and the sequencer shows the guitar track just played and recorded (yellow)

Using this multi-layered approach, other players with different instruments (bass, synth/keys, rhythm guitar, vocals etc) can come together to create tracks, using the website integration to pull everything together.
Which brings us onto the website - it's pretty straight forward and rather than spend ages discussing it with photos here, visit http://www.microband.co.uk and see for yourself!

Having recognised my username and password, the server knows which guitar I've got, and updates the onscreen avatar to reflect my customisations. In time, we hope to have a full video creation tool, where players - having created their multi-track mp3 songs - can animate their avatars in time to their own musical creations.

We've still quite a way to go to get a "complete" working, finished product. But at the same time, we're now at the point where we need to see how people use the instruments, to see how and where we need to improve things. So the first batch of guitars have been made up and sent out.

The next job is to get some pals together, have a massive jam session one weekend and get a load of samples recorded for the website! (and of course, to record some videos to demonstrate just how cool these little instruments are to play - if a picture is worth a thousand words, one Youtube video is worth, erm, just loads of these types of blog posts - look out for a video update soon!)

Miniature instruments update

We've not really done much on the actual instrument hardware in recent days - except perhaps finally settle on a design we're happy with. Since trying numerous ways of building the instrument from layers of acrylic, we feel we never quite got the neck/fingerboard design right. Until tonight....

This latest style - the Les Paul classic shape - now has a fingerboard slightly raised from the body join. This is how a real guitar looks- the neck may be bolted flush to the body, but the fingerboard is always slightly raised (presumably to help the player to reach those tricky 22nd and 23rd frets!)

We're going to use this design on all our guitars in future, raising the fingerboard slightly proud of the guitar body. Here's how we acheived it -

Each guitar body is made of 2 layers of 5mm acrylic (with the middles cut away to create a hollow into which the electronics are places inside the guitar body). The lower layer does not include a cut away for the guitar neck to sit in. In the old design, we would glue the 5mm guitar neck onto this lower layer, so that when the fingerboard and 3mm top body layer were placed on, they were pretty much in line.

By adding a 3mm shim on top of the bottom layer, when we put the guitar neck on, it is raised above the height of the second layer. When the final (top) layer of acrylic is in place (often a different colour to the 5mm layers) the whole assembly is flush. The fingerboard is placed on top of the neck, with the end result that it stands a few millimetres above the guitar body - just like the real thing!

Miniature guitars manufacturing process

Incredibly, it's November and we're still perfecting the manufacturing process for our range of miniature instruments (starting with the micro guitars). We've got the PCBs made up and have placing and soldering the components down to quite a fine art - even if we're still doing everything by hand, until we've a working pick-and-place machine.

Soldering the multi-core cable is still quite a job to do by hand but we've got it down to about five-ten minutes per instrument, including testing and resoldering should any dry joints cause problems.

One of our bottle-necks is getting the guitar strings consistently the same length and all bent to the right angle(s). These finished guitars look ok, but if you examine them closely (around the bridge and neck positions) you'll see that on some, the guitar strings look a bit bent and wiggly.

While we had the laser cutter out, we made a simple jig for bending the wires.
We went through all the guitar designs and made sure that the holes for each lined up exactly then made a template for bending our wires.

As you can see, using the jig, all our guitar strings are now neatly lined up, all the same length, and all entering the guitar body at the same angle. Such a simple job - but it makes such a difference!

New guitar models added to the microband range

After spending a few days soldering up some of the new PCBs from www.pcbcart.com we fired up the laser cutter to make some enclosures for the new miniature guitars. We're working on a complete range of micro instruments at http://www.microband.co.uk and hope to have at least eight different guitar models.

We've already got

• Stratocaster
• Flying V
• Explorer

And we're hoping to complete the range with

• Les Paul
• Warlock
• Telecaster
• Gibson SG (AC/DC)
• F-hole blues (like BB King's Lucille)

Tonight we managed to design and cut out two of these new guitars:

This is going to be an SG style guitar, for Andy at BandJammer.
While Angus Young from AC/DC usually plays a maroon-coloured SG, Andy's  favoured guitar is a mustard yellow one (at least that's the one he uses in most of his videos and promotional material!). The closest match we could make was a yellow acrylic, but here it is partially assembled. It's a surprise gift, so let's hope he's not reading this blog!

We've some 1.5mm HIPs on order for the scratchplate. We tried making it from thick card, but it didn't look nice (and stank the workshop out with a nasty tarry smell as the laser just burned the paper and filled the cutter with smoke!). Here's the guitar we're basing this one on....

For our Les Paul style guitar, we wanted to try something a bit different to the previous styles. We've got a red Stratocaster, a yellow Explorer, a green Flying V and now another yellow guitar. A blue Les Paul just didn't look right and we don't have any gold coloured acrylic to re-create Slash's famous goldtop.
So who else plays a Les Paul and isn't Slash...?
Zakk Wylde not only plays a Les Paul, but also plays a white one, with a striking bulls-eye black-and-white pattern. Perfect! We've plenty of white acrylic in both 3mm and 5mm!

Unlike previous miniature guitars, we've moved away from the 5mm black acrylic, and decided to make the entire body from the same colour, yet stick with a black fretboard. The end result is actually quite nice.

A few stickers and a bit of finishing off and we shouldn't be too far away from the real thing -

Working guitars - Flying V and Explorer

After what seems to have been months of development (and re-development) we're finally ready to ship our first two miniature guitars. The software is still in "beta" phase, so these are going to our good friends Aaron from Oomlout and Chris at HPC Laser

Here's a video showing the basic guitar functions, and the software in it's current state (including lots of "coder art" - we're techies here are Nerd Club, not artists!)

Each instrument uses an Activex exe (sorry true geeky types, Windows only until someone can write a Linux port) but the benefit of this approach is

• using a different thread to actually play sounds means more responsive play
• anyone with a bit of macro-building experience can write their own software to integrate with the instruments.

The software shows how multiple users can share music by recording to a different track for each instrument. This demo shows an existing drum track with a guitar track being played over the top.

[video goes here]

Back to business - little guitars again

It's been a disruptive couple of weeks - the move from Brighton to North Wales was ok, but finding everything in the aftermath has proved a nightmare! So what better way to find out what's here, what's missing, and what's still somewhere in the depths of our monster Transit Van than to actually get making stuff.

Not having access to the tools (nor even the internet for most of the last few weeks) means quite a bit of software development has been going on. We've been working quite a bit of late on
Setting up HackLlan - a new "hackspace" in the mountains
Creating a time-line-driven sequencer for players to create and share music over the 'web

But now we've got some of our stuff out of boxes and into the hack-cupboard, it's time to get making again.

 a state of chaos in the new cupboard-come-office

if you can't find it, look in one of those stacking boxes...

We're actually quite excited about how well the software development is coming along, even though it's not much more than an array of samples and a piano-roll style screen. Our current guitar prototype works quite well with the software, but we're still having a few teething problems. Whether this is the software, the hardware or the firmware, we've yet to resolve. So in true "hacker" style, we've attacked all three at once.

Here's the new pcb layout, etched and ready to solder.

Before we left Brighton we were working on using a solder pot to connect the tiny fine-pitch multi-core wires to the circuit boards. We've got everything ready to go - except the components box with all our SMT stuff isn't immediately to hand. That doesn't mean it's not here. But it could just as easily mean it's somewhere in the back of a van, under a heap of household items and bedding....

Miniature Explorer and Flying V

Following the Brighton Mini MakerFaire, and taking a few days off to help out at BuildBrighton (setting up stalls, packing away again, moving to the new hackspace and so on) it's time to concentrate on actually getting these miniature instruments finished!

Aaron from Oomlout came all the way down from Halifax to Brighton, especially for the MakerFaire but had already expressed an interest in the miniature guitars, so we demonstrated our early prototype. He wanted to buy one there and then! So we've set about making a few different guitars.

 Here's a Flying V being put together in green. We've only got 1.5mm in white, so all the scratchplates and accessories have to be white for now - so we're trying to pick colours that will show up the scratchplate well (we're sick of making stuff out of red, black would be a bit boring, blue a bit dark....)

Below is an Explorer-shaped guitar (as played by U2's The Edge, and James Hetfield of Metallica - although they tend to stick to black rather than bright sunshine yellow!)

Then we had to make a whole load of pick-ups and embellishments. In this case, we're cutting them from 3mm black acrylic - the square-shaped ones at the bottom are humbuckers and the middle bits get covered in chrome sticker to make them look authentic (although for a Les Paul type guitar, the pick-ups are usually gold coloured, rather than silver, but we've only got silver!)

A few different guitar accessories - single-coil pick-ups, humbuckers, and bridge supports

The guitars being assembled - the red stratocaster is our working prototype. The others are new designs, which have taken quite a bit of trial-and-error to get right!

Miniature guitar - working prototype

Another exciting day at Nerd Towers as we've finally completed our first working miniature guitar prototype. Not only does the instrument work as expected (touch sensitive guitar frets, and a touch-activated strummer) but the software is coming along quite nicely too.

Although the miniature instruments are HID/USB devices using a simple 8-byte buffer interface to talk back to the PC, some people may be a little uncomfortable working at such a low level. So we're creating an easy-to-use, event-driven COM object, so anyone can create their own custom software to work with the miniature instrument range.

No worrying about bitmasking, byte buffers or retrieving data - all that has been taken care of. Simply create an instance of the COM object, and write your code to respond to events such as

• x_instrumentConnected
• x_keyPressed
• x_keyReleased
• x_guitarFretChanged
• x_guitarStrummed

and so on.

Obviously, not all events are available to all instruments.

The key press/release events are specific to the synths, for example, whereas only the guitar and bass ever raise the guitarFretChanged event. Such an exciting post as this wouldn't be complete without a video demonstrating a working guitar - so here goes:

[youtube video goes here]

Holy moley - look at these PCBs

Well just as we'd got some piezos into our little drum kits, there was a ding-dong on the door of Nerd Towers, and a DHL parcel arrived. It was the double-sided PCBs from PCBCart! Like spoilt kids at Christmas, we immediately forgot about what we were doing and ripped apart the latest present to arrive. Impressive looking stuff...

Black solder mask, hot-air-solder-levelled (HASL) contacts and lovely white silkscreen on the front:

Here's one in place on an actual miniature guitar:

We've got some tiny quarter-pitch cable soldered onto one of the PCBs already - now we just need to mount a miniature USB socket onto a board so we can try the actual device out and make sure everything works as it should!

Miniature drums again

Just when it looked like we were all set to finally complete a miniature synth, our piezos arrived in the post - so naturally we dropped everything and set to work on our miniature drum kit again!

Here it is, looking more and more like a real drumkit every day...

At first, we made little acrylic circles for the tops and bottoms of each drum (see where the base of the snare drum meets the stand, for example) and covered these in shiny chrome sticker paper. Then we found some 3.5mm chrome door strip (for pimping up your car) on eBay and decided that gave a much nicer finish (see tom toms and floor drum for example).

The chrome sticker came in handy for finishing off the hi-hat, so it didn't go to waste!
Hopefully we'll get a final drumkit prototype working some time tonight....

Minature instruments again - synth redesign

Some more electronics goodies arrived in the post this weekend, so while the idea of making an X-Y CNC type framework is still very exciting, it's time to turn back to our miniature instruments idea. In in particular, we've been looking at our miniature synth.

Although we got a working keyboard up and running relatively quickly, when it comes to boxing it all up and putting it inside a nice neat enclosure, things have taken a turn for the worse. Using the existing key layout as a guide, we put together some designs for three different types of synth:

• Mini-moog
• Roland style keyboard
• Yamaha keytar

The problem is, the actual keys part of a synthesizer keyboard are only a small part of the overall instrument. So while the keys look fine on their own, put them, inside an enclosure, and the whole thing looks enormous - especially when compared to the guitar and drums

Cutting out prototypes from cardboard is a much cheaper way to try out new ideas, without spending a fortune on laser cutting acrylic which could very well turn out to be useless!

So we've had to re-scale the keyboard part of our synth.
At first, we just scaled the plastic keys to about 80%, printed them out and tried to see how they'd fit in with the rest of the range. Of course, this didn't work - because the PCB will pretty much decide how big (or small) our keyboard can be. We've redesigned the PCB so that the pushbuttons for the keys are as close together as possible, and then used that as the basis for the new keys layout.

All in all, the final synth design is about 75% smaller than the first attempt.
But more importantly, it's a little more in-keeping with the rest of the instruments in the range.