Forum

Hi all,

EigenD is obviously an extremely flexible system. The recent introduction of the Fingerer allowing woodwind fingerings is a case in point.
(See e.g. this thread http://www.eigenlabs.com/forum/threads/id/933/ )
The keys of course are very high quality as well [as is the instrument itself].

However, in some cases it would be good to have a layout other than a rectangular layout, e.g. for woodwind, or for isometric hexagonal.

Now - would Eigenlabs be interested in selling kits? I.e. a bunch of keys, with cabling to connect those keys into (say) a "pico box". The keys themselves might have a simple screw mount, and could thus be put into any physical configuration. [Ideally the breath controller and the strip controller would be modular as well.]

I'm wondering what a Pico looks like inside - I assume the keys are soldered/screwed onto a pcb or similar, and one couldn't actually disassemble it easily - not that I would want to try :-) But an "Eigenkit" would be very tempting.

Hi Bjoern

We'd love to be able to offer some kind of kit for making weird Eigenharps but sadly it's quite a challenge to do this.

Technically it's difficult as you'd have to do your own electronics and board layout, the keys have to be mounted to a board which has the data conversion hardware on it, so every key layout needs it's own board. Those boards have to be multi-layer as noise is a big issue in the signal chain (we use 8 layers in a Pico I think) so designing them is quite a stretch for a home enthusiast. It's not impossible though, just hard and there are many ways to get it wrong.

The other issues involved for us are commercial and legal. There are serious regulatory issues connected with selling this kind of thing (quite a few small kit vendors just break the law here but we're not in a position to do that), this stuff has to be tested and that's expensive. I suspect the market is small and I doubt that it could ever recover the cost - EMC testing alone runs to £8-10K.

There's no lack of will to provide such a thing here, its just that technical difficulties coupled with too many onerous regulations make it currently non viable.


John