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As many of you know, I've been working on a project with fellow electronics.stackexchange user Majenko. Much of the project is born out of conversations on this site. The electronics.stackexchange has played a pivotal role in shaping the design of this project.

I shared some of the early thoughts and designs on the project through the EE chat - thanks to everyone for commenting on our work so far, it's been immensely helpful.

In short, the project is an open source programmable synthesizer. It's called the Ronin 802.

The website is now online and the project has just gone live today.

I posted this on the front page:

So far we have produced five different versions of the Ronin 802, and we are now in the final stages of the design process. Over the next two weeks we will be scrutinizing the hardware and taking suggestions from the electrical engineering community for possible improvements. At the end of this two week period we will be ordering a final production prototype. Once we are happy with this prototype, the first batch of boards will be manufactured and will be available to buy before Christmas.

I'd like to ask the members of this community to have a look at the project and see if there's anything they might like to add to it.

I'm not sure if this is the best place to ask for help, let me know if there's somewhere more appropriate.

If you want more info on this project, please visit the website: http://roninsynth.com

Thanks :)

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  • \$\begingroup\$ A little off-topic, but I notice that your "Buy Hardware" page reads the first batch of boards will be ... available to buy before Christmas. - I'd work hard to hit that goal, and make v2 awesome with community input secondary. You need to partition features for v1 and v2 when you take input from the community. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2011 at 22:59
  • \$\begingroup\$ Oh I intend to hit that goal, come hell or high water! (I've made allowances for problem solving, I'm pretty confident it's all good to go) Not sure what you mean by making community input secondary? I've tried to partition things, I'm using version numbers, and I've set out a way for people to document changes. I haven't really found any particular contribution management system, to allow the project to be more autonomous, maybe I'll be looking into that when things pick up pace. Thx \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2011 at 23:11
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    \$\begingroup\$ Sorry, that was poorly worded. I meant that, with a ship date of early December, late October with is a strange time to be making feature requests. Launch primarily, make changes secondarily. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 28, 2011 at 0:02
  • \$\begingroup\$ cool, I see what you mean. I guess it is a bit short notice ;) cheers again. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 28, 2011 at 0:37

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Can you ask this here?

Well, sure, Meta is a fine place to ask a question about promoting projects. Here are a few ways of promoting this, in increasing order of applicability to your situation:

Commercial advertisement

If you want to run a commercial ad, send an email to [email protected] or call the numbers listed on the contact page.

Also consider sponsoring a tag. This gives the tag an icon as well as placing your ads on relevant pages like /tagged and the tag page. See the Android tag for an example, we don't have any of these on Electrical Engineering right now.

Self promotion through Q&A

If you want to answer questions about audio generation while referencing your shield, or ask questions about problems you're trying to work through as you design it, then go right ahead! Just make sure you're asking or answering the question rather than just promoting, and disclose your affiliation with the product. If you want to mention it in Chat, same policy applies.

However, asking the question,

I just built the Ronin 802, do you want to preorder it, volunteer as beta testers, offer suggestions, or contribute code/design improvements?

would not be appropriate. That's not a question. It's not a problem you face. It's not useful to our Q&A.

Here's a better option for you:

Community Ads

The officially sanctioned way to do this is through community ads. See: Open Source Advertising - Sidebar - 2H 2011 for the current promotion; there will be another starting in January.

From that post:

Here is your chance to create a Free Vote-Based Advertisement for an Open Source Project. Create a graphical ad for an open source programming project and post it as an answer to this question (in the right format), and it will feed live remnant ads on Stack Overflow.

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source. It's for finding programmers who will help contribute code or other programmery things (documentation, code review, bug fixes, etc.).

Assuming that you mean "contribute code or design improvements" by see if there's anything they might like to add to it. (which seems likely, based on my reading of your Contribute page), you should qualify for this program! While the visitors to this Meta question will be quality people who are well-qualified to contribute, that program will put your request for help in front of about 10,000 times more eyeballs.

I do note that your firmware design files are in a zip file. That's not exactly contribution friendly. The site for the product is great, but I suggest that you host the project on Github, Bitbucket, Google Code, Source Forge, or another open-source hosting engine.

See also the blog post and introductory MSO question for more information on community ads.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Thanks for all your tips :) The community adds look perfect (and more importantly free, my pockets aren't bottomless, I've only been in business for two years and we have pretty much started from nothing) I'll have a good read about that tomorrow. I've been looking at Source Forge and Github, but I was a bit unsure about it, I'm still considering options really. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 27, 2011 at 23:21
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    \$\begingroup\$ There's also this program which EE isn't currently participating in, but certainly could be... \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 28, 2011 at 22:11
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Kevin Vermeer, I took your advice - it's now available through Sourceforge.net \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 29, 2011 at 16:25
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    \$\begingroup\$ Community Add added! - meta.stackexchange.com/questions/93312/… \$\endgroup\$ Commented Oct 29, 2011 at 18:52
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Shog9 thx for the link, at first I didn't realize I could also post on that program. Cheers! \$\endgroup\$ Commented Nov 4, 2011 at 19:15

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