DropCraft, Inc.

This week at DropCraft, we took several big steps: 💸 We onboarded our first angel investor — a huge milestone that will help us get our first working prototypes built.

🧑‍🏫 We met with a strategic advisor who’s going to help us navigate a lot of what we don’t know yet about building a company and bringing a new kind of product to market.

We also had a lot of fun!!! There’s still an enormous amount to figure out, but each week DropCraft is becoming a little less theoretical and a lot more physical. #MusicTech #HardTech

This week at DropCraft, we took several big steps: 💸 We onboarded our first angel investor — a huge milestone that will help us get our first working prototypes built.

Because we’re building our designs with parametric CAD, we can quickly adjust dimensions, print another version, and learn from the result. This is exactly the kind of rapid iteration we hoped prototyping would give us.

🗂️ We automated more of our accounting and planning workflows, helping us stay lean and spend more of our time actually building.

This week at DropCraft, we took several big steps: 💸 We onboarded our first angel investor — a huge milestone that will help us get our first working prototypes built.

📐 We’re tightening up the CAD models for the Station hardware and getting ready to print fully assembled parts.

🖨️ We printed our first Drop prototypes, and 3D printing is already changing the product. Our original ideas for the size of the Drops and Station were too small, so we’ve increased everything.

This week at DropCraft, we took several big steps: 💸 We onboarded our first angel investor — a huge milestone that will help us get our first working prototypes built.

🎵 We started planning our first official artist meetings, where we’ll get DropStation in front of some of the people we’re building it for.

DropCraft is becoming a physical thing.

Seeing parts that started as ideas and CAD models become physical objects is a pretty significant milestone for us. Every print, every line of code, and every new prototype gives us something new to learn from and improve.

One of the things I’m enjoying most about building DropCraft is getting to make something creative with people I love and respect. We’re making music, hardware, software, art, and physical objects all part of the same thing. It’s hard to imagine a more fun group of problems to work on.

DropCraft is becoming a physical thing.

💻 We finished our initial software architecture decisions and will start writing our prototype firmware this week.

🛠️ We’ve started working with prototype designers and fabricators to bring some of our first artist-specific Drop concepts into the physical world.

DropCraft is becoming a physical thing.

🎸 We onboarded our second Artist Relations advisor as we start building our initial network of artists.

🖨️ We started 3D printing scaled-down DropStation parts to learn the process, test the design in the physical world, and make adjustments before we move to full-scale prototypes.

DropCraft is becoming a physical thing.

Now we’re moving from experimentation to implementation. This week:

⚡ We onboarded our electrical engineer, who is starting work on the custom electronics for our prototype Drops.

DropCraft is becoming a physical thing.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been experimenting. We’ve tested different hardware, displays, storage, controls, audio, and ways for Drops to interact with the DropStation. We’ve worked through our early software architecture and learned a lot about what we actually need to build.

When I started @dropcraftinc, I had very little knowledge of electrical engineering. My knowledge of the inner workings of computers stopped at understanding registers and memory addresses.

Here’s the weekly rundown. I may start doing these on Thursday instead of Monday now that we’ve started a weekly team cadence.

📆 Held our first weekly team meeting. 🎛️ Validated our prototype audio components. 👾 Chose our primary systems programming language (Rust). 🎤 Started Operation Kevin Bacon (theme song soon). 🎨 Started our search for a 3D artist.

When I started @dropcraftinc, I had very little knowledge of electrical engineering. My knowledge of the inner workings of computers stopped at understanding registers and memory addresses.

Readability is more important than ever with LLMs taking over so much of the typing load. Hopefully, we can contribute some Rust libraries back to the open-source community as we build.

Our audio system prototypes are working. Our physical controls are working. Our displays are working. Even our external I/O through the Pico 2 is working—something I thought would take much longer.

When I started @dropcraftinc, I had very little knowledge of electrical engineering. My knowledge of the inner workings of computers stopped at understanding registers and memory addresses.

Unfortunately, nobody can help me organize my wires 🤣.

We’ve been moving faster than I expected on both the hardware and software sides. We chose Rust for building our software over C/C++ or Python. The latter two have more support, but Python isn’t a good fit for our production product(s), and we find Rust easier to read and reason about than C/C++.

When I started @dropcraftinc, I had very little knowledge of electrical engineering. My knowledge of the inner workings of computers stopped at understanding registers and memory addresses.

I’ve been teaching myself more and more each day—yes, using LLMs, but also reading blog posts and books and talking to real human beings. The speed at which you can learn something new today is astounding compared to when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s.

3 Aug

Last week was another banner week for DropCraft. 🧘 We finalized our prototype team. 🏗️ We began preparing to print our first prototype parts. 🎤 We sharpened our artist relations strategy and outreach. 🚫 We received our first thoughtful funding rejection. 🧑‍💻 We launched our company website.

3 Aug

Over the coming weeks, we’ll continue refining our industrial designs, building our hardware and software, meeting with legal advisors on fundraising and artist partnerships, and preparing for our first working prototypes.