December Update

Winter has arrived here in Montana which means it’ll be about 5 months before we see green grass again or drive on dry roads, but we’ve got the snow tires on the car and the ski areas are open and we’re looking forward to some good skiing and fat biking in the snow!

Inventory/Supply Chain Status

We’ve worked hard over the last few months to build up inventory so that we don’t keep selling out of products on the website and for the most part we’ve been successful. There are still occasional shortages when we get more orders than expected in a given month, but it typically only takes a few days for replenish inventory since we usually have all the needed parts in stock now.

Because of the political situation in the US there’s a lot of uncertainty over what’s going to happen with tariffs in the coming months and we’ve been trying to take steps to minimize the impacts, but even that costs us time and money since we have to purchase more inventory to stockpile or search for alternative suppliers.

Custom Guitar Project Update

The past few weeks have been a case of “take 2 steps forward, one step back” as we work out some issues with how to attach the guitar body to the “core” of the guitar (where all the electronics are) and I realized that a few design decisions made earlier on made the task more difficult than it needed to be, so we’re doing a minor rework on some of the mechanical design. I’ll be updating the OFMG Guitar project page later this week with more details.

These latest changes don’t impact the PCB designs so we don’t have to change any of those, and it just a matter of 3D printing a bunch of new brackets and adapters and building some more prototypes.

One good thing about the delays we’ve had in this project is that it’s allowed me to evaluate the new version of the Raspberry Pi Pico processor (the Pico 2) and we’ve decided to adopt it for the guitar — it will give us improved performance today and room to grow for tomorrow.

Originally I’d thought we’d have the guitar done and on the market by now, but I’m glad we’re taking the time to think things out and make something that will hopefully be around for a long time, rather than rushing and comprising the design just to meet an arbitrary deadline.

Best wishes to everyone!

-Scott P