Happy Spring, everybody! Here’s an update for all you who are patiently awaiting the Pocket Integrator:

• Back in March, I was pretty sure I had one month of work left to do before final manufacturing. Well, that turned out to be more like three months, alas. That wasn't due to any one particular thing, but I did hit several really hard & mysterious bugs with the first 1.8v prototype. Also the QA test-mode, which is crucial for manufacturing ever though normal users will never see it, was a bigger job than I thought it would be. And the analog MIDI output feature turned out to be way more complicated than I planned, necessitating a redesign of the output filters. You know that aphorism about the first 90% of the job taking the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the job taking the other 90% of the time? It's been like that.

• However, I’m glad to say that I’ve gotten through all that. At this stage, I am working with our board-assembly partner to verify the test procedures. We are purchasing components and readying the final silkscreen for the PCB production.

• With all that in mind, and in the interest of getting this to you sooner than later, I want to announce that I’m postponing the PO Debugger feature for a future firmware update. I’m committed to this feature — it’s what’s going to let people re-program their Pocket Operators — and I am sure that some of you out there are excited to play with this as well. On the other hand, I think most backers are just wanting to shake out some beats, and I want to get them started. The PO Debugger is coming, I promise, but it’s going to take another month or two of development work, whereas the rest of the package is just about ready to go. Shipping sooner is, I think, a better result for the largest group of backers. But if you’re the kind of hacker who’s going to use the PO Debugger feature, then maybe you’d like to get early beta access to this feature? If so, please get in touch!

• Given our assembly partners’ backlog of work, it seems at this point that we will be shipping in the fall rather than the summer. I dearly appreciate your patience. I would so much rather get this right than rush you a flaky product.

In other news, I recently decided my prototyping game needed improvement. I kept having solder issues with my new prototypes, and it was hard to see what was going on. So I finally got hold of a binocular inspection microscope. Where has this thing been all my life? OMG, such a game changer! My wife is maybe getting a little tired of me calling her down to the workshop to stare at ants and grains of sand and bits of crud I found on the workbench. But the microscopic world is just beautiful. Also it’s kind of amazing to use hand tools under a microscope — I never knew my own fingers could be so precise! And every prototype I’ve built since I got the scope has come out flawless. So three cheers for microscopes!

More news soon! Thanks again for your support!