Hello! Happy Summer!
It’s been over a year since the Pocket Integrator was released into the wild. I’ve been enjoying mine, I hope you’re enjoying yours.

Last summer, I used Pocket Integrator with the BLEEPS AND BLOOPS RIDES, a series of audio-bicycle ride-performances that my friends and I have been organizing here in Portland, Oregon and in a few other towns. We basically invite people to strap synthesizers and musical instruments and speakers to their bicycles and ride around together, contributing to a field of moving sound we can all listen to and (sort of) control.

We have been doing that for a few years now, and the chaos has been delightful, but last summer I started working on a way to synchronize all of that electronic music coming out of all those bicycles to a single beat. (I guess I am a little bit sync-obsessed.) To do that I used the Pocket Integrator as the master clock; it drives a maybe-too-large pallet of synth gear mounted on my cargo bike, and also sends sync to a little radio box that transmits a timing pulse to a bunch of other radio boxes mounted on everybody else’s bicycles, which then convert that pulse back into MIDI clock and/or analog sync signals for their synthesizers. Or, if someone wants to join the ride on their bicycle but they have no synthesizers, we can still put a radio box on their bicycle and it will just go “Bloop!” (That’s one reason why the radio network is called BLOOPERNET.) This all sounds far-fetched and complicated when I describe it, but it’s been working well and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s fascinating how a strict tempo can turn a cacophony into a symphony.

BLOOPERNET became my all-consuming project last summer. It uses a lot of the same internal technology as Pocket Integrator. I’ve been releasing parts of the firmware on GitHub under an open-source license as they’ve matured enough that I’m not too embarrassed by the code. Nevertheless, I haven’t done any more work on Pocket Integrator since the firmware update last Spring.

It was my plan a year ago to add features to PI for debugging and reprogramming Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operators, as a first step toward an open-source Pocket Operator firmware project. I have a lot of ideas for that project, but I have to admit it’s much too big for me to do alone and I’m really not sure who besides me has a use for it. I probably should not spend months of effort on the first step of a group project until I’ve actually found the group. So, if there is a feature of Pocket Integrator you’re still waiting for, please do get in touch with me and let’s talk about what we can accomplish together.

Also: last Spring when Teenage Engineering redesigned the Pocket Operator around a new chip, I had to scramble to figure out how to keep Pocket Integrator compatible with their hardware changes. Luckily I found a fix, but that wasn’t at all guaranteed. It was frightening, actually, to realize that my new accessory could have been so instantly obsoleted. In hindsight that risk seems obvious, which is another reason why I’m reluctant to commit more resources to Pocket Integrator.

But I want to again thank David Erikkson at Teenage Engineering for his encouragement, support, and availability to answer my technical questions, both during the over-long development process of Pocket Integrator and again when that change happened and I was scrambling to understand the problem. Nobody at TE ever intended to glitch your Pocket Integrator. It was just not on their radar at all. They’ve had to deal with chip shortages and vendor changes much more than I have and they’re doing the best they can. I love their gear and I’m still very inspired by their design philosophy.

And I’d like to thank you, again, for your support. I wanted to crowd-fund an invention, and you helped me do that, so I hope my invention is bringing you joy. As always, I stand by to assist with any technical difficulties you might have and, as always, I am very interested to hear what you’re doing with Pocket Integrator and how it’s working out. There are still just a few Pocket Integrators available for sale through Crowd Supply; we might make more of them someday if there’s demand, but I can’t say when that would be.

These days there are a lot of other small, interesting, affordable music devices that fit in the same pocket as a Pocket Operator that you can play with on a stage, on the bus, or during a dental exam. Just to name one example, the infinitedigits Zeptocore is an open-source PO tribute/clone/remix that’s fun, cheap, and ripe for DIY hacking. Designing such stuff is easier today than it’s ever been, using open source tools like KiCad and low-cost prototyping services from companies like OshPark and JLCPCB, and with the immense bounty of helpful advice and support provided by the patient and kind-hearted citizens of Internet forums. These are fun times!

If you’d like to keep an eye or an ear on what I do next, be sure to follow the MSL Blog at msl.mykle.com. Any mad-science I get up to will be documented there. I am still developing BLOOPERNET and will definitely be organizing more audio rides with it this summer, so come join us if you can. Meanwhile, any updates or additional bug fixes to Pocket Integrator will of course be announced on the main PI page. And, if you have questions or need support, please come ask in the main support thread.

Cheers,
-mykle-