We’ve quite a bit to cover in this update so we’ll try and keep things quick and on point…the first thing to talk about is…

As these devices are just about to leave our workbenches out into the wild, a few of you had been in touch over the last few months about the product name, thanks again to the people who we’ve had conversations with about this! From this point onward, and before they go to any retail partners, these devices will now be named…. "PÚCA DSP". This is to avoid any confusion with this product and an existing Eurorack module by Erica Synths that is named "PICO DSP" and also another similarly named Raspberry Pi audio project.

To help with the name change, we’ve been working with Dublin based illustrator Eoin Whelehan who has designed a new panel for the Eurorack expansion module. The Púca (pronounced pu-ka), by the way, is an Irish mythological creature who is known in folklore circles to take on different forms, a bit like the shape shifting nature of this device, whereby different firmwares can be flashed using a web browser. Here’s Eoin’s panel illustration:

And here are the finished panels that were received from OSH Park’s After Dark PCB service earlier this week, and a rack mounted module:

You can check out more of Eoin’s work at the links below:
Instagram: www.instagram.com/eoinwhelehanillustration/
Carbon Made: https://eoinwhelehan.carbonmade.com/
Facebook: @eoinwhelehanillustration

For backers waiting for the Eurorack module, these will be shipped to Crowd Supply’s warehouse in early November, as we need a little more time to finish the in-house small batch assembly, and fully test each module before shipping. On the production side, we have received all the development boards back from our manufacturing partner, and are busy testing and flashing these in preparation for shipping them to Crowd Supply’s warehouse in early October. We’re pretty happy with the final boards and we hope you will be too!! Now is also the time to check that your shipping address at Crowd Supply is correct, and update this if you need to. You can check and change your address within your "Order Details" from your Crowd Supply Account page. If you need any help with changing your address, you can contact Crowd Supply Support

A couple of things to note - when you get your board, be careful when handling the 3D antenna while working with the board. If you are using breadboards for development, I find that using a small flat tip screwdriver or similar can help to "lift" the board out of the breadboard without having to touch the sides of the PCB, or the antenna. Also, each board has a sticker with the serial number on it and indicating it has passed quality testing - please don’t remove this, as we will need it if, for example, you have any issues with your board when you get it. We use the serial number to track the board in our test matrix.

Each production development board is flashed with a test firmware which simply outputs a sine wave, so you can verify the codec is working okay, and creates a WiFi soft access point with the network name "PÚCA DSP". If you open a browser window (Chrome, Firefox) and go to; http://puca_dsp.local you will find an html page with a firmware update function.

We also have some certification news, this week the development boards were undergoing radio (RED) and emissions (EMC) testing, and while we won’t have the final test report for a few weeks, we’re happy to to report that the testing is going ok so far.

That’s all for this update, so we’ll leave it there for now! Most likely before the next update some of you will have received your boards, and we’re looking forward to hearing some feedback about them! The next stages for us, after all these devices ship, will be all firmware related, and new firmwares will be available in the project’s public GitHub repository.