If it was rubber baby buggy bumpers I doubt if anyone would be able to say it properly in that length of time. With enough practice, though…
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Maybe the most value that comes from this endeavor will be cautionary advice. It’s risky to offer pledge bonuses that are entirely new hardware units that exist only as a description on paper. It also seems like at best a lack of oversight on Kickstarter’s part to allow pledge structures that promised multiple new devices being designed, implemented, and put into production by a small startup.
What we know today:
- The company is in a skeleton crew mode
- The summer MOD update suggested that sales are not going well (apparently affected by disgruntled backers who were contacting YouTube influencers and leaving bad store reviews)
- There’s a focus on the new MOD Desktop app; software will be the company focus for now given their constraints.
What conclusions can be drawn from the (highly unlucky? comical? absurd?) story of the pedal to date? Each reason on its own can be valid and part of a company building things and encountering obstacles narrative. But something feels off with the overall number of times samples came back incorrect, having to switch factories a few times, and yes now the odd rubber bumper issue. One conclusion is that this process is incredibly detail oriented and requires:
- Someone with extensive industry knowledge and firsthand contacts at reputable factories to act as product manager.
- Daily persistence to check-in with factory contacts, project managers, and parts suppliers
- Ruthless attention to detail to minimize production delays and shipping costs for development of prototypes
I’m not sure if they are in a position to check these boxes at this time. With a wait time of several years and counting, adjust your expectations accordingly.
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For sure. I definitely haven’t been waiting the longest (coming up on 6 years on my part) but was smiling to see photos a few months back of completed hardware units on the shelves with bumpers seemingly being the obstacle. Sounds like there may not be an infrastructure at the moment to oversee the expression pedals production and distribution given the focus on the desktop app? Would be good to know if it’s been officially “placed on hold” or not from the team.
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It is placed on hold kinda yes, the “bumper” thing was more of a signal to indicate us that we should focus on other things while we were not shipping those units just yet.
I can’t speak for production pipeline or issues, but can for software issues. We have tried to use it live for a few demos, but results have been subpar. The pedal value changes are not smooth at all, which breaks the whole concept of such a device.
My current and best theory for why that happens is embed CPU being too weak to handle the quick amount of messages needed for smooth operation, together with the lack of a dedicated floating-point co-processor. As we use floating-point numbers for all parameter values in control chain devices, this has the potential to explain why some things run very slow there.
EDIT: I have been told we used to have the peal sending smooth values, so there is a performance regression. in any case it is too early to tell anything, everything is just speculation for now.
There were also some bugs regarding pagination, most we have fixed but a big one still remains where changing pages can trigger CC device disconnects on the Dwarf/Duo side. We work-around this by having 1 single control page when demoing the expression pedal, but obviously this is not ideal.
At least software-wise the 1.14 has the changes needed to handle firmware updates for it, similar to how it is done for the footswitch (and I realize there were reports of this being broken in 1.13 for the footswitch, still need to look into that…).
% curl https://download.mod.audio/releases/cc-firmware/v3/devices
{
"api_version": 1,
"devices": [{
"uri": "https://github.com/moddevices/cc-hw-arduino-shield",
"name": "Arduino Shield",
"label": "",
"description": "This is a shield compatible with most Arduino platforms.\nIt was conceived to help developers and makers create their own effects controllers with Control Chain, tailored to their own unique performance requirements."
},{
"uri": "https://github.com/moddevices/cc-fw-footswitch",
"name": "XF4",
"label": "FootEx",
"description": "The official MOD footswitch extension.\nLike the MOD Dwarf's own footswitches, it allows you to scroll through lists, toggle effects on and off and also define tap tempos."
},{
"uri": "https://github.com/moddevices/cc-fw-expression-pedal",
"name": "ExpPedal",
"label": "ExpPedal",
"description": "The official MOD expression pedal.\nLike the MOD Dwarf's own footswitches, it allows you to scroll through lists and toggle effects on and off. You can also control regular parameters using the foot pedal."
}]
}
% curl https://download.mod.audio/releases/cc-firmware/v3/versions
{
"api_version": 1,
"devices": {
"https://github.com/moddevices/cc-fw-footswitch": {
"latest": "0.4.1"
},
"https://github.com/moddevices/cc-fw-expression-pedal": {
"latest": "0.0.5"
}
}
}
So things are moving while at the same time they are stuck too.
It is frustrating to have these 20+ units in the office gathering dust, but beta-testing for it from user side wouldn’t do much at this point before we solve the major issues we know it has.
Maybe the path forward is to involve some community members here too, the footswitch firmware is opensource and the idea is to have the same for the expression pedal. So maybe we could ship a unit to those willing to help the software/firmware side of it. (this is a personal thought, not a company one)
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Customs official:
"Say 'rubber baby buggy bumpers' five times in a row in six seconds or less and you get your stuff".
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Cool, thanks for the update and good to know where it is at the moment. As a software engineer myself I’d love to help in any way I can with it if it becomes open source! Thanks again.
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Thanks for the update @falkTX
Honestly it is nice to hear someone say that the project is on hold (‘kinda’ 
) but it would be better to get an official statement from @gianfranco
I get that the MOD team has had better days, but dont blame it on the rubber feet if you know that this is not the root cause
The hold is lack of manpower to push for it. As falkTX said, the units are currently there waiting for the assembly. But that is a combined effort that we are not finding the time to do right now in the middle of all these fires we have to put out.
ps: the rubber bumpers are in place
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What I’m reading is that the pedal is broken by design for its primary use case and that getting the available hardware working passably will require applying a non-trivial re-write or firmware workaround.
Not sure where you read that. Everything I’ve read says that a few test units were assembled and tested, but that the parts for a fairly large quantiy were in the ‘shop’ waiting to be assembled.
Where did you get this information?
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" So maybe we could ship a unit to those willing to help the software/firmware side of it. (this is a personal thought, not a company one)"
I’d be willing to do that. I would be able to jump in and do that a lot more quickly than I would on the modelling due to the learning curve there.
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regarding the lack of smooth values, I have been told we used to have the peal sending smooth values before, so there is a performance regression that happened along the way.
in any case it is too early to tell anything, so everything is just my own speculation for now.
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the pedal is available yes or not?
thank you
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I’m afraid to ask for an update, because I guess it means the situation for the team is difficult… but… how are things doing ?
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Hey! Been a minute but wanted to check in to see since last this November if there has been any software updates to get smooth values again on the expression pedal? Is there anything some software devs (such as I) could do to help? Also did those bumpers ever arrive from the new order? Thanks and hope all is well.
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Yeah this isn’t nice, that Mod, is not supplying updates for its expression pedal!!
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I pledged for the original Kickstarter fund in 2014, paid for the expression pedal. 9 years later now. I tried to find an update in this forum, but I don’t see any good information. Is there a realistic timetable for delivery of the expression pedal we pledged for? Never expected it to be this long 
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