Product Update #2 - it's never easy + happy accidents
over 4 years ago – Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 08:14:19 PM

Well, so how are the new prototypes?!

Getting the box got me giddy with delight, here were more Bitties at once than I have ever held (18 to be precise, 10 white, 8 black). I soldered on the speaker, attached the knobs and buttons, loaded up the operating system in a couple minutes (they're much easier to program now - note about time later). 

And then nothing. No sound out of the speaker, no sound out of the headphones. Ultimate bummer.

Some hope - the board looked like it was working fine, things were lighting up, the software was loading. 

So in come my friends Brian Martins and Mark Feldmeier (who invented audio on the Arduino) and tag teamed the problems, and after poking around we discovered that the headphone jack wasn't connected to ground, and the amplifier was not getting power. 

10 minutes later, we had a fix, two little wires, one for the jack and one for the amp: 

So what happened? There was a bug on export from the PCB design software where two of the traces got disconnected, and no errors showed up. Quite frankly an expensive bug. 

And would have been horrible to fix manually for a thousand units. Thinking in terms of hundreds or thousands, a minute of doing something for each unit of a thousand will take over 16 hours, or two full days, if someone were a robot. Three minutes, and we're talking a week. 

Well, so what! That fix was easy enough, and won't happen on the production run. Brian did it manually for six units and those are the Bitties that went to Knobcon! You can see a video of them in the last Kickstarter update.

The bug that is a feature - happy accident

With the fix, the Bitties had no headphone-only mode, it outputs sound to BOTH headphones and onboard speaker at the same time. (funny enough that's how the very first boards worked, but we'd made it behave "properly" since then - headphones inserted cuts the speaker).

So when they're on tour at loud events like Knobcon, the Bitties are plugged into a loud speaker. With the onboard Bitty speaker also enabled, the person playing it can still feel the sound in their hands. People kept commenting on this over and over, and it became apparent that this behavior is a keeper. Not only does it just feel fun, it's also really useful to be able to discern what one is playing when in a loud jam. 

People who play acoustic instruments, like guitar, have no problems feeling their music, because the thing they're holding is vibrating. This is the same idea.

What next?

We need to do another run of prototypes. Brian Martins is going to take it over the finish line (yeah brother!!) and we're tossing around the best way to implement an [Off / Headphone Only / Both headphone and speaker] modes.

All the things from the last product update were addressed. The on/off switch is great (may become a threeway switch). The high pitch speaker whine has been minimized (in my opinion it's now negligible). The jack positioning is proper (left in, right out). The headphone volume is "just right" (loud enough at a modest comfortable level). 

Besides the three way functionality, the things we'll be addressing are: subtle USB power noise over speaker (which might stay, because it's barely audible, and is not present in the headphone out so recording would be clean). Also, when the Bitty starts to run low on batteries, it starts to brownout (reboot) because the CPU resets itself when not getting enough juice. It'll always act like that, but the goal is to get it to last as long as possible before doing so, particularly on alkaline batteries (it works great with Energizer Lithiums, or Eneloop high capacity rechargeables). 

The thing about the Bitty is that it's working pretty hard to suck enough juice from two AAAs to power the amp and speaker, so there's plenty of boosting and amplification, which introduces some noise and fluctuations in power. The overall sonic character is punchy and crunchy anyway, but the target is to get the cleanest version of that out into the headphone jack, so recording can be free of added noise. 

And some other polishes. If you want to see some real dirty behind the scenes, I'm going to do something unusual and post a link to the year of notes between myself, Gavin, and now Brian about the last three versions of the hardware: Bitty Google Doc

And also this is a good time to once again thank all of the people who have worked on the Bitty engineering (in chronological order): David Cranor, Owen Trueblood, Mark Feldmeier, Gavin Lund, and Brian Martins. Thanks brothers.

How about some more fun!

I just cut together a 1 minute highlights minute video of people who attended Knobcon doing crazy things with the Bitties: 

Took the Bitties to Knobcon in Chicago!
over 4 years ago – Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 01:52:43 AM

Oh wow, got the latest prototypes last week, and took them to a synthesizer expo in Chicago this weekend. It's called Knobcon (yeah, my wife chuckled too :)

It was a blast! I have to be honest, I had some butterflies about showing these to "the pros." After all, this is a serious exhibit with some of the biggest names in the music gear world (like Moog, Roland, Yamaha, Korg, you get the idea) and many modular synthesizer manufacturers. People whose opinion and criticism I respect and fear. 

But. All of that was in my head. People had tons of fun playing with them, and I made new friends and potential connections. I have two full crammed pages of emails of people writing their info in the margins of the page. Like wow. On a meta level, it was yet another lesson about how things in my head often don't match reality.

Want to see how it was? Reverb.com is a music gear website, and as of today Bitty is on preorder there for the next month, as there is still time to add units to the Kickstarter run. You can refer your friends there (but it's cheaper through Backerkit for backers). You might get a kick out of the website.

Reverb came by the expo and shot this video of the whole show yesterday, Bitty is in the beginning!

Product update coming this week. Some interesting developments! Long story short - it's not yet perfect,  and there's a bug that's clearly a feature. Stay tuned!  -Nick

P.S. This was kind of funny. I showed up to the expo with five Bitties, a speaker, and a lamp. But the entire hall was pretty big, and from far away it looked like there wasn't much on the table at all. Fortunately IKEA was literally across the street from the event, so I went in there looking for one of those mini shelves with the lip to hack as a tilted display or something, but walked away with a cork pad and $60 worth of plants :)

Here's a picture of me prototyping the booth in the store. You can see the final result in the video above. 

Product Update #1 and 33 Countries!
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 06:05:26 PM

Product Update

My good friend Dan (who's also a backer) walked into my studio last Friday and said something funny like "It's nice to see you play with the Bitties on the internet and everything, but how's the hardware coming along?"

So let me tell you. Gavin finished the latest iteration of the boards last week and we ordered a new set of prototypes this Tuesday! 10 white ones and 8 black ones. Due back in three weeks. 

The major things we addressed in this round:

• On/Off switch (you had to pop the batteries in and out before, it was funny)
• The speaker output had a faint but high pitched whine sneaking in (that wasn't audible in the headphone output) and was a byproduct of the power supply. The Bitty runs off two AAA batteries which are 3 volts and it boosts it to 5 volts to give the speaker amplifier more power. The boosting requires super fast switching and some of that was audible. So he made a bunch of modifications to isolate the different paths on the board.
• We swapped the position of the input and output jacks (left in, right out, sort of like reading)
• Made some modifications to the audio output circuitry to make it louder in the headphones. The Bitty is an interesting combination of a digital audio source that subsequently goes through some analog circuitry and filtering, which is what gives it a unique analog/digital grit.

Once we get them, we'll test them thoroughly, try to break them in different ways, etc.

If they're good to go, we're well ahead of schedule. If they're not, we'll do another round and still be on schedule. More tweaking than that would be surprising. The February date was set to be realistic, because it sucks to wait more than expected for something you want. I'll keep everyone updated. 

Backer Surveys

I have a profound sense of gratitude to everyone who got some addons through the Backerkit surveys. The software donation/membership support has me feeling awash with thank yous. 🙏

17% of backers have yet to fill theirs out, if you're one of them please do so (you don't have to buy anything, the most important thing is to have your address). Do a search for "Backerkit" in your email, or let me know and I'll send it again.

The platform gave me some statistics that blew my mind. In particular that the Bitty will be shipping to 33 countries! That's incredible. 

Next Steps

As we move the product further through the prototype improvements, there's safely a month or so to get more people on board. So Bitty will be back briefly for preorder on a music gear website soon, and prior to that I'll be running a twenty Bitty giveaway for a week. 

Keep an eye on your emails for this one! And much love to everyone.

-Nick

Bitty Solo // How to fold a tshirt in 3 seconds
almost 5 years ago – Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 09:21:55 PM

Speaking of tshirts, years ago I was watching a Japanese tv show and saw a method for folding tshirts in three seconds. Folding laundry has been fun ever since (at least the shirt part).

You can see the video with a helpful diagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZEsElADWU/

Bitty Solo

After the last jam video, backer David L was curious to see what the Bitty was doing in there, here's a video of it solo:

The right knob controls global pitch letting me tune the kicks/snares/hats up and down, and the left knob switches between patterns (in this case letting me play slower or faster). I'm otherwise holding down the kick/snare/hat buttons practically the entire time. 

Surveys

I'm hitting send right after this update! Talk to you soon!

-Nick

Video + Your Address!
almost 5 years ago – Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 11:15:43 PM

Hey dear Kickstarter backers!

Video

A couple weeks ago, I was working on some Bitty software late at night. Working on tests of a looping functionality. Out of nowhere Eoghan, one of my guitar playing studio mates, dropped by and then so did Gerard, an old friend who plays the drums. 

This spontaneous jam at midnight on a Sunday ensued! 

I feel so grateful that things like this happen sometimes.

(Btw, I got rudimentary looping working on the kick drum of that Bitty, which will probably be known as Full Metal Bitty. So many kicks.) 

Your Information

You’ll be receiving emails to fill out your address information from a platform called Backerkit. So expect to see that in your inbox. You’ll also be able to grab an extra Bitty at a discounted price or a sweet shirt.

Details

If you need to change your survey responses, purchase add-on items, or update your shipping information, you can click the link in your survey email again or request your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page. (This page will only start working after we send the surveys out.)

BackerKit helps save lots of time by streamlining the survey process, automating data organization, and helping with pledge management software to make it easy to process your pledge reward shipments.

If you used your Facebook credentials to log in to your Kickstarter account, the BackerKit survey link is sent to the email address you use for your Facebook account. If you have another email address that you prefer to use, please contact me.

Thanks for all your support. And can’t wait to send you your Bitty!!

-Nick