This update is probably the most expected: today Seeed Studio is officially opening orders for the minichord 🎉 🎉 🎉
The team at Seeed Studio worked hard to be able to offer the minichord as soon as possible and answer the many requests the I received. It will be available in a clean black and white colour scheme, for a retail price of $129. An initial batch has been manufactured then, depending on the volume of orders, more will fabricated month by month 📈.
To be able to attain that attractive price, some trade-offs had to be made regarding the marking of the buttons: while I CNC engraved them, this method was not scalable at a reasonable price. Seeed Studio had to use stickers instead. Also initially there will be only one colour available. I’ll circulate a poll in the coming weeks to identify the most wanted color schemes for future batches. In any case, minichords are easy to customise if you have a very specific color scheme in mind 🌈 !
🛒 If you want to pre-order, please use this link to do so!
🎥 In order to present the product, we’ll do a livestream this Friday 11/04 10:00 AM PST. I’ll be there to present to product and do a Q&A session. One minichord will be given away during that event 🎁 !
Of course the timing of the launch makes it hard not to mention the current tariff situation. I’m sure you have a lot of questions, but I only have very few answers. In the short term, it will impact potential US buyers, but in the long term it might make producing the minichord itself uneconomical given that the Teensy microcontroller it uses is an US-made product. My hope is that the situation will resolve before it becomes a procurement issue.
This whole adventure would not have been possible without the kind support I received from many of you, so thank you for that! I’m looking forward seeing all the cool music that will be played on the minichord 🎶
Regards,
Benjamin
➡️ 📬 If you have any unanswered questions, feel free to reach out, either by email, or through Instagram.
➡️ 💻 To ask for any additional software feature, you can use the issue tracker on Github
Fine print:
I’ve used a privacy-friendly newsletter and disabled all tracking options;
I’ll never share your email or use it for any other use than the stated one;
I won’t send more than an email every two week (and you can actually expect a lot less until the project is launched);
Once the project is fully available for purchase, I’ll delete this mailing list and all data related to it.
To express your right, feel free to contact me by email.