Posted by chipweinberger 1 day ago
The firmware is about 110K lines: MIDI recording + streaming, USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, web APIs, storage, OTA updates, diagnostics, security, peripherals, provisioning, and an embedded web interface.
There’s a lot required to make a full-featured product.
Nearly every component gets tested: sdcard, clock, battery, anti-counterfeit IC, led, buzzer, the tactile-switch!
I suspect that 110k number might include the ESP-IDF libraries as well as his own code.
I've written a fairly feature-complete handheld device based on the esp32-s2 and the codebase is about 9k sloc of the C I've written, but that number explodes to almost 40k sloc if I include the esp-idf's imported libraries.
How did you find customers?
How did you get your hardware design verified?
1) Does device record ALL MIDI sent to it? (Including e.g. SYSEX and non-registered parameters?
2) I edit MIDI on a Desktop (NOT a phone). a) Are sessions recorded into separate files? Named and/or dated? b) Can I inspect & load sessions from the card?
But why do you spell MIDI in lowercase there?
> plugs into your piano via midi
The real answer: I got tired of deciding what should and shouldn't be capitalized. Sounds easy but it gets ambiguous fast.
I'll revisit this decision at some point. Capital letters do make reading easier.
Can you expand? What counterfeits do you see (literally someone selling boxes labelled jamcorder? How do you handle that? Lots of scanning amazon and sending cease desist letter?
Your anti-counterfeiting tech hopefully / probably prevents your Chinese manufacturers / suppliers / related entities from free-riding on your work. (If your volumes start hitting say 50K+, things may change, you may be entering dangerous territory then, so I'd suggest you spend some time on beefing up the moat).
Good luck towards 10K volume!
That makes hardware hard! The manufacturing and packaging is the easy part.
Interestingly I've heard a very similar story and sentiment about hardware vs software from another single-person maker (also a software engineer by trade) of a hardware product, also in the music space. And this one was comparatively a more complex product on the hardware side, and did face some supply challenges during covid and tariffs, forcing at least one redesign and price raise. But in both cases, I'd say they made smart choices about keeping the hardware simple. By not pushing the envelope on that front they gave themselves the freedom to invest a lot of time and effort into the software. But not every hardware product is like that (which the author also does acknowledge).
Would like to see this highly non-obvious point expanded upon.
Part of the reason I wanted this in the first place was to have the data, a few hundred hours of all my learning and playing. At some point I or someone else will start thowing all this midi into an LLM.the jamcorder has been saving everything I've played in a very tiny amount of space with no effort by me, ultimately will be even more useful.
https://www.izcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/pm_Pocket-Record.j...
