How I Created a Digital Guitar and Turned It Into a Business

My name is  and is now under active development. We are based in St.-Petersburg; the team consists of three people: I’m responsible for the technical part, my partner Ildar — for marketing, finance, legal issues and Roman - for the musical and content part.At the moment, the electronics, software and case have been completely redone. The story will be continued soon in the next article!Those who are fond of following the project updates, please, leave your email in the form on the website and subscribe to social media.I really hope to get feedback from you with your comments and suggestions!Thank you for your attention!

Funny episode from the development process

I was sitting and debugging NRF52, trying to output the data via UART. No results. I checked the code, soldering, even re-soldered the chip — nothing works!And then randomly, I restarted the board in an unusual way –letter N came to the terminal in ascii. It corresponds to number 0x4E, which I haven’t sent. I restarted again — letter O has come. It is strange. Perhaps, the problem is in the quartz resonator, and the baud rate has failed? I changed the frequency in the terminal, restarting the board — again, N came. With every new restart, a new letter came, which eventually made a repeated phrase — “NON GENUINE DEVICE FOUND.”What does this NRF venture do? I’ve cleared the firmware. How on Earth can it remember after the restart what was sent last time? It looked like a kind of seance. Perhaps, I’m the very NON GENUINE DEVICE?When I looked up on Google, I found out that manufacturers of FTDI chips, which are installed in USB-UART dongles, found a way of fighting with Chinese counterfeits. Windows driver checks chip originality and on the go replaces the input data with this phrase if it is counterfeit. Evidently, my dongle turned out to be a counterfeit, and replacing another has solved this problem.I thank the counterfeits again.