It has been a busy Summer for us here at LZX, with both R&D and our in house workshop! Here’s the state of all current projects at the end of this past week.
During the last half of Q2, ESG3, DSG3, and TBC2 hardware units have been assembled, but waiting for a production firmware release before shipping begins. We finished those releases this past week, and all three modules are now being beta tested in house with release candidate firmware. If everything continues to look good, we’ll start shipping in July. This is a final testing phase for the firmware/hardware (after many before it), so we expect it will go smoothly.
DWO3 needed another PCB revision after the one we thought was production ready. We have revised some performance critical components of the design that will have been well worth it in the end. We will be entering production on this module in July if our first articles of this next revision look OK.
With these projects out of the way in R&D, we can finish finalizing the Chromagnon hardware/firmware. We have built our way to this point carefully, redesigning a large portion of the device around the use of a subassembly that will help us navigate the current electronics supply chain with less risk – it’s been more time up front, but makes the final part of the job, and the transition into production/fulfillment go much more smoothly. So expect to see some news about the Chromagnon hardware next from the R&D team, in August.
There are 5 new utility modules ready for Gen3 that the workshop got moving during their wait for ESG3/DSG3/TBC2 firmware releases, and we will have initial quantities of these modules available for sale this week. The modules are Sum/Dist, Proc, Matte, Keychain & Stairs. We won’t be accepting preorders or backorders on these new modules, so when you seem them up for sale, it will be after the listed inventory count is boxed and ready to ship. So there may be some availability gaps due to our need to prioritize preordered products, but that should only be temporary while preorders are being fulfilled.
We’re nearing the end of a very long journey with R&D since 2018. On a personal level I’m excited to focus on wrapping up some loose end firmware projects, writing more user docs, and getting back in touch with the community.
Please let me know if you have any questions, and thank you for continuing to support us no matter the weather.
We’ll be sending those along with ESG3, DSG3, TBC2 to Johnny Woods very soon, to do more 3 patches videos. It’s going to be hard to allocate a lot of time for demo production in house until the Chromagnon release, but we could do some live Q&A/patch streams that get archived. I will try to at least post some patch diagrams.
This is such great news @creatorlars, thanks for posting it
& someone’s already posted it to Discord where its creating an active conversation too.
Nick’s stream today was great yet I only caught the last 75 minutes or so. He did a quick Stairs & Staircase A/B (upon request which was damn nice of him considering he’d probably already done it earlier in the stream) & jez, what a difference! Gen3 is the bomb!!! Congrats
I’m so interested in purchasing these first 3 modules. However, I have not done any pre order yet. So does that I’m out of luck on preorders being all filled and essentially I cannot order any units till q4? Or is the July run of shipments going to have a reserve of units that can still be purchased today???
It might be worthwhile finding an LZX dealer near you, and enquiring if they have anything on pre-order that you could purchase.
Or maybe just wait until product is made and distributed then hunt down what is available in the market… less ambiguity with that approach.
TBC2 might not reach ready-to-ship inventory until Q4, but ESG3 and DSG3 should be in stock sometime this summer. I fully expect all three modules to be available somewhere online shortly after they begin shipping–either from private parties or dealers.
KeyChain is 3 hard Keyers. Nick gave a cool demo of its style of output on the LZX Twitch account about a month ago but its not up there anymore. He used the Visionary TFKG module on a camera feed & it looked great!
Hey Pascal @meudiademorte, was it you who posted a link in the Discord recently to a Google Drive backup of some or all of the previous Twitch streams that Nick has done?
I gave a video synth workshop here in Berlin this evening, Sunday 10th July, & it was nice to tell a couple of the participants, who pointed out that the Visual Cortex isn’t even on the Schneidersladen page anymore, with full confidence that ESG3 is imminent and the wait for an encoder is soon over.
It’s been a bit of a long week for us here – initial batch testing of 9 units of ESG3 on Monday uncovered a new clock crystal tolerance related issue. A couple units were outside the other unit’s lock ranges at their resting frequencies. We’ve got this resolved now it appears – but we are going to be testing for another day or two to be sure, before we can say we are done. Some of us are also out of office or sick right now, so I don’t think there will be any ESG3 going out this or next week.
Right now, it’s still looking likely we’ll be at a spot where we can start shipping them before the end of the month.
This week, we also added a test pattern generator mode to TBC2, so that we can have a native reference for 1V color bars. This is making the RGB calibration on ESG3 units very pleasant, as you can see from the below photo. We pulled out a Tek WFM90 vectorscope we’ve had lying around for ages, and are putting it to work.
TBC2 firmware has been performing great, but I’m trying to get ESG3 out the door first (so that I have an output to evaluate TBC2 with other than Visual Cortex.) It was nice to see how quickly I could add the extra generator mode to the software engine, which bodes well for the speed at which we’ll be able to release new firmware extensions post-release.
