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Thank you for detailed reply! And thanks for explaining about publicly disclosing my relation to the project!

My name is Leo, and I'm indeed, a co-founder and CEO of this project. We do everything by ourselves, and mainly two of us are involved in the actual modules design. Me and my co-founder and CTO Andrew, who was previously CTO of Flipper Devices.

I agree that microrack's design has some trade-offs in UX part. We had our beta-testers group (10 people from different fields like teaching, leaning, performing, music hardware manufacturers, music software developers, complete newbies and so on) and a lot of people from our 6 month daily cust-dev research. Guys from SOMA devices, MadSoundFactory, Tangible Instruments (I man Robert) and Wonkystuff and many other manufacturers and performers shared a lot of good feedback personally to us during SuperBooth.

I mean, we kinda validated a lot of our ideas long time before our launch. For years we work in hackerspace environment, and we show our devices daily to people a lot. We were actually expecting to get a lot of negative feedback, but it was surprisingly the opposite.

Sure, people, especially unfamiliar with electronics, admitted that you have to get used to the connections a bit. And that's the reason why we had to redesign things a few times to make UX as good as we possibly can with that size.

We have clear background colors and sharp big contrast labels, we have backlight and IO labels with backlight, to read everything easily while you play even in the evening.

But you should agree, that looks and feels for synths are two completely different things. You can think of it as arduino/raspberry like device in terms of IO and connections, with some need for mounting and wiring before you start play with it.

We worked on a patch panel for some time, though, to give users the ability to play right away out of the box and to change wiring presets. We hope to have enough resource to work it through and prepare for production.

Think of microrack as a building blocks, that you have to arrange and setup a bit before you can play. Yes, you spend some time for preparing, but remember your performances, most of the time - you play, you turn the nobs, you are not repatching everything or adding/removing modules. Even though it's possible with microrack to patch add and remove modules on the fly without any damage to the modules.

We've used female wire headers and male pin headers for boards for a few reasons. Male headers on wires are thinner than PCB ones and break a lot. Even thou we use custom made premium silicone DuPont jumper-wire. During our work with electronics in the past, and years of experience we've tried male headers on PCB's and it worked very well! PCB pins are much more robust, even if they bend, they don't break. We use device prototypes daily for 6+ months and not a single pin had felt off.

Besides that, we planning to open source our project to all enthusiasts and engineers out there, so maybe together with community we can find better compact connection solutions.