Hello world!

We launched our Pocket Integrator crowdfunding campaign last week with a social media blitz and just a wee bit of fanfare here at home. Actually I was a bit too work-stressed to celebrate properly, and now the USA elections are happening and everybody’s holding their breath, so we’ll wait to celebrate until that’s all finished. It’s been fun, though, to finally show off this Pocket Integrator Explained video my friend Dan Hererra shot a year ago:

Dan is a sweet guy, a talented musician and engineer, and now he’s gonna be a filmmaker. Go Dan! Here he is helping me to relax behind the camera by pointing a scary thing at my face:

Coincidentally, just about when we launched the Pocket Integrator campaign, Teenage Engineering (TE) launched their new beer! It’s an Okinawa-style lager, but it’s only available in Sweden.

Hey actually … are you reading this in Sweden? If you are, I would really love one of these TE beers! In fact, I’ll offer a FREE POCKET INTEGRATOR to the first reader in Sweden who will commit to sending me a can of TE beer in the mail! Is that legal? Almost probably! It’s fine here in Oregon, but I think you have to be 20 years old to go into the Systembolaget, and I don’t know about the Swedish Post Office’s regulations. But it ought to be alright. It’s a very small beer can.

As I’ve been announcing the Integrator in various online forums dedicated to the Pocket Operator (PO) and other Teenage Engineering magic, people have been very supportive and nice, but I have also heard a persistent rumor that TE might be discontinuing the Pocket Operators! People are bummed about about this, obviously.

Fortunately, the Teenage Engineering sales department told me this rumor is not true. It’s just that TE is very low on PO stock right now, because they’re struggling with the same chip shortages and supply chain issues as the rest of us. But they expect to have three models of PO available again in the first quarter of 2023. Meanwhile, this Forbes article suggests that availability is getting better for certain chips, especially chips based on more modern manufacturing processes. I hope that means TE will soon be able to get the microcontrollers they need to get all the other PO models back in stock. Clearly there is demand.

Meanwhile, it’s true that the Teenage Engineering Store is sold out of many Pocket Operator models. But they do still stock the super-cool PO-128 MegaMan, and the PO-133 (which is actually the excellent PO-33 KO! sampler pre-loaded with Street Fighter samples.) Other models are still available from various resellers, including Control Voltage, my local synthesizer shop in Portland. When you order a Pocket Operator from them, you’re supporting my local weirdos!

On the other hand, I encourage you to support your own local weirdos. Online shopping is cool, but local music stores are really worth supporting, and they just might have that hard-to-get Pocket Operator model you’re looking for.

Anyway, thank you again for your interest in Pocket Integrator and your support of this campaign! If you have any questions about it, or if there are any features you’d like to see demonstrated, use the "Ask a Technical Question" link at the bottom of this update & I’ll get right back to you.

Please consider supporting our campaign by ordering your unit today!

Ciao for now,

-mykle-