First

[DarcSystems]

Ya! Pretty active in here.

I saw your demo at the Pax East convention. Pretty cool setup. I've thought of trying to develop something similar in the past, but have too many projects on my plate already that I need to finish up. You guys should consider selling the guitars pre-built, instead of just the kits. I'm sure that would appeal to a larger market. Looks to still be in early development, and visually pretty raw, but I think if you guys could come up with something clean and primarily internally wired, this would be super marketable.

One of the guys at the table (I didn't get his name) mentioned that it's not yet supported on XB360. I hear the next xbox update is going to allow more use of 3rd party USB devices (mainly support for external storage devices). That may or may not help you out. I do know that if you plug a USB keyboard into the xbox, it recognizes it.

Anyway, I'm getting off track. Just wanted to stop in and say keep up the good work. As a hobbyist, myself, it's good to see people marketing their ideas.

[rchapoteau]

I also second the thought of having guitars with it all built in, or already modified. If

1) This worked on the 360 and
2) There were pre-done guitars

I would have spent several hundred on one, on the spot. Without the 360 support I MIGHT have bought one, but I'd probably be hesitant, but I might have bought it to use with the PC.

[Alan Chatham]

Thanks for the feedback! We're all really happy that you thought our stuff was interesting, and it really motivates me to get to work hardcore on this!

Thanks for your honest opinion on how the guitars looked; I'm going to try and get some photos of our prototypes up on the website, but it's great to get some input into how people want these things to look! We're hoping we find some people who are really crazy into casemodding and add some great artistic skill into that external, on the neck of the guitar installation, since that style has the benefit of being possibly non-destructive to the guitar. But you're right, some sort of enclosure to the PCB on the neck would have helped out a lot...

I was wondering if you got a chance to check out the black guitars, though, since those have the circuitry built into them, they look a little more polished and I was wondering about your thoughts on how they looked? Like, was the solder on the frets still too rough, should we find better ways to install the USB jacks and Wii cables? I'll get some pics of those ones up too. All this information really helps us make the best controllers we can, so we really appreciate it.

As far as completed guitars and XBox360 are concerned, in order to legally sell full guitars, we need to get some FCC testing done, and while it's an easy process, it's also abou $2000, so we're trying to figure out what are interest level is. Also, since once we get testing, we can't really change the circuitry, we're looking into a way to separate the stuff about the circuit that needs FCC testing out, so we have part of the circuit that handles communication and is FCC approved, and part that figures out the guitar fingerings and stuff that's FCC exempt. We're also really excited about interest for the Xbox; we're hoping that we can just add compatibility via firmware so it'll just be a firmware update you can download and install into the guitar via USB (that USB firmware update stuff is already implemented). However, we'll need some time to take a look at it, since there is a security chip about xbox controllers that we might have to license and add into the circuit, but it's going to require some reasearch and maybe some back-and-forth with Microsoft. Hopefully they'll be willing to talk to a small-scale production like us; the info on the Nintendo site for example requires you to have like 3 years in the hardware industry before they'll even talk to you about development kits and official support...

Thanks for the comments, though!

[DarcSystems]

The black guitar in the video? That looks much better. Are there more pics of it on the site? I haven't had a ton of time to look around yet.

The FCC is lame. What about the possibility of using a converter for the Xbox? XCM developed a converter a while back allowing the use of a PS2 DualShock controller on the 360. The converter allowed for a keyboard and mouse too, but perhaps similar technology could be stripped down, and reduced to just allowing your controller to interface with the 360. I wouldn't imagine it would increase the production costs all that much on the project. You could even charge people a little more for the converter to cover your expenses. Just throwing that idea out there.

I'd love to see more demo videos when you guys get them.