Embodme

My Erae II arrived unexpectedly this afternoon (I'd received no shipping notification and it's lucky I was home to sign for it when DHL rang the bell).

However, after spending about three hours trying it out, it's already somehow become almost completely unusable. Even before it got to that state, I was having some other issues trying to get it to do specific things I thought I was buying it for. I'll try to list them all.

1. Right now, none of the buttons 1-8 are responsive. These worked earlier in the day and I'm not sure what caused them to stop. I can change between layouts from the Erae Lab with preview on, but not directly from the hardware.

2. The "Settings" button is unresponsive.  It too worked earlier.

3. The "Loops" button presently does nothing, but I'm not really sure what if anything it's is supposed to do as it's not even mentioned in the Manual.

4. The other buttons (play, stop, +, -, scales, routing, arp, back) still work as expected.

5. The encoder wheel has come completely detached from the unit! I can see something that looks like a screw down in the hole where it had mounted. I may try to unscrew and remove the back panel tomorrow and try to reattach the wheel, but if this is going to unscrew itself every few hours of use that won't be tenable. To be honest, this wheel felt spongey, wobbly, and sluggish to spin from the first time I tried it and I really expected this to be a LOT smoother to use, especially as it's the only way to change tempo.

7. Since there is no acceleration, and because it can't be spun freely, using the wheel to change tempo is clumsy at the upper end of the range where incrementing by single-integer BPMs makes very little difference. Ideally, tempo/BPM controls should be logarithmic by default, with some other method for adjusting to finer granularity (e.g. push and turn). 

8. All of the buttons that are lit (e.g. the octave +/- and the 8 layouts) have an irregular trembling, flickering-candle aspect to them that is incredibly distracting and might render the device unusable for people with stroboscopic sensitivity.  I could not find a way to change button illumination. If this is by design it might be a dealbreaker for me.

7. In the Erae Lab software, the "ERAE Settings" button only allows me to do firmware update, although the "learn" panel suggest that there should be some other General settings available here (pressure range, MPE/MIDI merging).

8. Making a keygrid of small rectangles (2x2 or 2x3) repeatedly pops up a modal dialog about a 122-element limit. I really don't understand what this means and was not expecting to be unable to fill a ERAE II layout with one of these.

9. In Erae Lab, you have a vertical scroll bar on the right side of the screen that is only two pixels wide. This makes it VERY hard to grab, and that's something that has to be done frequently to get to all of the settings on the tune and style tabs. Please make this wider! We care more about functionality than sporty design in utility software like this.

10. The LEDs towards the bottom left side of the touch panel are not well-aligned behind the holes (lenses?) under the skin, so they project D shapes on the surface instead of regular circles. This is admittedly cosmetic, but I feel like it's worth mentioning, because all of the photos of your prototypes make it look like it should be a grid of uniformly circular dots, not some progressively raggedy gibbous moons.

Sorry to be a complainer; I know getting these through production has been kind of an ordeal for you folks and I'm glad it didn't end up in failure, bankrupting your company like a certain Kickstarter MPE synthesizer I put money on a couple years back.

At the same time, I really expected to get more use out of it than a couple hours and some of the problems I encountered in those hours really make me wonder if this is something I should try to return or sell off right away.

Is anyone else having any of these issues? Or did mine just slip past Quality Control? 

... now it's completely dead. At power-up, the backlight of the OLED turns on and off, but nothing appears on the screen. My computer does not see the device over USB. 

Not good.

wow man, i feel really sorry for you. Am just awaiting my unit to arrive and this stuff can turn a happy awaiting situation into **** this **** .

If i were you, i would instantly ask for exchange / money back.

I will follow this topic,  faulty Units can happen,  but it shows how those things are handled by embodme.

Good luck to you and please update your experiences.

I've opened a ticket with Embodme support.

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say that there's probably a faulty connection on the board -- either a fractured solder joint or a loose ribbon cable.  If so, I'd expect to see some of the symptoms I described, where initially everything works fine, and would have passed QC at the factory, but after a certain amount of real-world use where the PCB is flexing a tiny amount on each button press, we see some intermittent issues (e.g. flickering lights) before it fails altogether (unresponsive buttons, inability to boot).

As far as the encoder wheel goes, that seems like an easily remedied design flaw; the wheel literally unscrews itself a tiny amount each time you turn it counterclockwise until eventually it pops off.  I think that a shoulder bolt should be used here instead of a machine screw, and a thin graphite-coated washer probably would help also.

My unit has the same problem with the leds and the D-shapes.