Today I have put the finishing touches on the Chalky enclosure design. It's laser cut from 5.5mm 100% renewable bamboo laminate and 3mm frosted white ABS. It should look spectacular, especially when it lights up. Feel free to give me your feedback.

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Not content with simply giving away all the schematics and source code needed to build your own Buster or Chalky controller we've decided to go one step further - we're giving away the first Buster ever built.

That's great, how do I win!?

I'm glad you asked - simply tell us what you would use it for - either comment here on this blog post, mention us on twitter or post on our Facebook wall. The winner will be randomly chosen one week after the first Buster is completed.

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Our friends at IK Multimedia have been giving away free copies of SampleTank 2.5 with about 500MB of free instrument samples for about a year now. One of the problems I have encountered several times was installing SampleTank, and installing the free sound library but not having any instruments visible to use.

The trick to make it go is to click on "PREFS" just to the left of the SampleTank 2 logo, select "Browse", select your machines hard disk from the list of devices on the left and browse to "Library/Application Support/IK Multimedia/Instruments" and click "Choose". You may have to click "RELIST" to get it to rescan your instruments folder, and from there you can start making those kooky sci-fi soundtracks with a 1970 Minimoog! Awesome!

Next tip? Try setting the keyboard to chord mode and hooking up a Buster and being your own accompaniment.

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Recently I shot a video of my two-button prototype controller controlling IK Multimedia Amplitube 3, using the two buttons to control the next/previous patch triggers in Amplitube. The eight button Buster prototype is not far away now - hold on to your hats!

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I'm happy to announce that from today we will be taking pre-orders for Buster and Buster Custom controller pedals. This give you an opportunity to help fund the production of this great product.

All pre-sale customers will receive a free axe.io sticker and the words "Foundation Customer" etched on the front panel of their Buster. For Buster Custom customers it will be etched to the right of their name.

Project status:

As of this week software features have stabilised, prototype boards have been finalised for testing and the enclosure design will be ready to send off to be laser cut by the end of the week.

New enclosure design. Laser cut from 3mm and 6mm acrylic in a selection of colours:

New Thinkinator main board, with USB firmware and ability to upgrade the firmware at the press of a button:

New Blinkinator board redesigned for a better fit.

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