December 2025. Time to go towards a finished and commercialisable product. Something that I coud replicate faster than the last prototype I built, with a nicer finish (the paint wasn’t bad, but the aluminium sheet suffered a bit of the cutting and bending processes).
I also had to rethink how to mount the wood panels and the button circuit board. I spent quiet some time brainstorming with Paul (an other Paul who is an engineer from La Fabrique) and modeling ideas.
I finally settled on a solution and placed an order for metal and wood parts, electronic components, and printed circuit boards to build four alpha units.
The assembly was painful and time-consuming, thanks to a few design flaws I had to work around (especially a mistake in the orientation of some connectors. I was pretty annoyed with myself…).
In the end, 3 (out of the planned 4) alpha versions came to life. I had the great joy to offer the first one to my father as a Christmas present (yeah, my father happens to be a composer!)
In a way it felt like coming full circle: more than 2 years ago, when I first started struggling to produce realistic-sounding orchestral soundtracks, it was my father who mentioned he’d seen people build their own MIDI controllers with Arduino boards ; just at the moment I was beginning my internship at La Fabrique!
An other important thing: I finally reached a major milestone. I acknowledged I had finnaly built a beautiful, ergonomic, and reliable MIDI controller that has a real chance on the market.
It was know time to crack open the piggy bank (dip into the money from the CentraleSupélec Foundation’s entrepreneurship grant I’d received a few months earlier) to build a beta series… See you next week!
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