Making Bopp & Steve
This lovely module has been underway for a while now and it has had some design changes and chip improvements along the way. We have now had our ‘golden prototype’ and we can start producing them.
Everything was arranged to be in-house so we could start final assembly and testing on the 21st of October. Beautiful fronts from Repos, somewhat populated boards from JLC, potentiometers from Taiwan and our stock of headers, LEDs, rings and knobs ready to go. As well as rolls of solder.
We also 3d printed our own LED spacers in 1, 2 and 3 LED versions. To make our 100 Bopp & Steve we need 300 of 3, 200 of 2 and 1.000 of 1 spacers to be loaded with LEDs manually. Sticking spindly metal legs into tiny holes and often times, in my fingers.
The boards came with the Raspberry RP2350 chip and AIC3204 codec chip, op-amps, muxers, dual optocouplers, resistors, transistors, capacitors, power converters, USB-C connector and jacks already on there.
We first added the power header which enabled us to flash the RP2350 with all that is Bopp & Steve (for now) and this was our first test of the board and its MCU.
All but three passed. When investigating these boards with an infrared camera it was quite obvious which component was producing a lot of heat. These components were turned by 180 degrees somehow, which was easy enough to fix.
Then we added potentiometers (place and solder round 1) and LED buttons (round 2) the 3 LED and 2 LED (round 3) and 1 LED (round 4). These four rounds took us (3 people and friends) the better part of 3 days.
With everything finally on the board we could do a proper testing. We hooked every Bopp & Steve to a Geometric Anomaly and a Wobbler2 to provide test signals. We have a built-in test protocol for the push buttons and gates test, CV in all jacks test, knob range test, LED test, envelope out test and the stereo signal path test. 99 out of 100 performed great the first time through. The one that did not want to play, turned out to have its chip rotated. This is now aligned properly.
All 100 Bopp & Steve work!
1500 rings and 1400 knobs were affixed resulting in one blistered thumb and index finger and some loss of sensation that will hopefully return soon. All of which resulting in a great big stack of cheerful space effects or deconstructed reverbs.
Now we work on the screenprinting the boxes [note: all 100 done yesterday], the manual, the merch and the final up-to-11 elements of the software. So that when Stijn decides the sound is exactly as it should be, we can flash them and box them all up.
I estimate this will be sometime next month but the finalizing of the software cannot be rushed and also needs some time to ‘cheese’ when it’s done. Much like a good cheese it needs some time left alone to ripen and to be turned upside down.
Wishing for Bopp & Steve for Christmas.
