The Saw Bench: Kickstarter and beyond

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As all of you may know, our latest mini synth, the Saw Bench, is on Kickstarter. The funding goal was reached in under a week and in the next days the figure doubled. There are literally more than a hundred pre-orders. We opened post-Kickstarter orders (mail us if you want in on this asap), and yes, we will sell the casing separately. 🙂

Preparations are underway for everything:

  • Testing of the production PCB’s sets: DONE. We now have 20 of them lying around, which will go into the assembled version. We already assembled the first dozen. We ordered 100 more PCB sets and they should arrive this week.
  • The DIY manual (80% complete, needs some more details and description of the mechanical assembly). You can already have a look at: https://www.tastychips.nl/wordpress/?page_id=527
  • The CNC milling machine was installed and tested. This thing is seriously fun. So far, engraving  wood and aluminium it seems to work excellent. There are some great plugins for Inkscape which allow direct conversion of Inkscape projects to CNC gcode: https://github.com/cnc-club/gcodetools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N12_1nCTuWM . You can also use stuff from the Eggbot plugin to simplify the milling of fonts (much faster, no jumps, no repitition: ideal for small fonts). Eggbot is a easter egg painting CNC machine: check it out: http://egg-bot.com/
  • Components were ordered: everything from pot knobs and led spacers to opamps and OTA’s. In the process we depleted some of the stocks at our favorite supplier 😉 We already recieved the first 10 kilos of components. More to come!
  • The casing: we made arrangements with the factory. These guys specialize in processing of sheet metal, coating and painting and we now know we can realize these casings in a relatively short time. We’re currently fine tuning the design.. which is a more flatter (and better looking ;)) version of the prototype.
  • Firmware update: since the stretch goal of 8000 euros was reached an improved firmware version was realized: this features looping envelope (VCA and VCF separate), glide (acid, anyone?), legato (no retriggering when holding down multiple notes). All these are accessible via MIDI CCs.

More CNC: 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVBXN8DZIc8

With the risk of being superfluous: some popular questions answered:

– Yes, we will make more sawbenches after the Kickstarter

– Yes, we will sell casings separately

– No, schematics will not be released

– Yes, the firmware is 100% open source

Contact us at tastychipselectronics@gmail.com if you were too late for the Kickstarter and want one (in whatever form). We’ll put you on the pre-order list.

Cheers!