What a week! We’ve finished finals, shipped out Maples all over the world, moved into a new office space, saw tons of gadgets, and lived to blog about it.

First off, it sounds like some people are having trouble getting the IDE working with their new boards. We’ve put board sales on hold until we fix some issues and will be posting progress and snapshot releases in the forums over the next couple days. Once things are smooth we’ll put our remaining 15 boards on sale; another batch of 250 are just finishing assembly and should be on their way to us any day, hopefully there won’t be any gaps in  availability!

Second, good news for those with a rev1 board and an FTDI chip! We’ve successfuly flashed the newer (rev3) bootloader over the ST hardware serial bootloader by applying voltage straight to the appropriate pin on the  microcontroller. It’s easier than it sounds, check out this forum post for directions and a photo. If you have trouble we’d be happy to reflash your  board if you pay for half the shipping (we can make a house call in the Boston, MA area!).

Another hanging chad is Mac OSX support for the IDE. The blocking issue right now is the tangled heirarchy of cross compiling a cross compiler that will run on both 32bit and 64bit versions of Snow Leopard and actually generate properly linked binaries for the Maple… we’ve spent a lot of time playing with fat binaries and have had tons of partial success using automated build scripts, but it’s going to take one more all-nighter to cook up the right magic make sauce.

Maker Faire was last weekend and I had a great time running around the Bay Area checking out open hardware genetics hardware (OpenPCR), a sweet DIY Liquid Nitrogen rig, quadrotor drones, and libre yachts. Lots and lots of great projects out there, i’m really excited to see what kind of real time audio effects can be pulled off with a Maple, and to do some crazy helo tricks with all the processing done with an on-board Oak.

And finally, look at that hansome fellow in the snazzy new office space! We’re the first tenants in an awesome new tech incubation/business/work space in Cambridge called Technology City. We’ve finally got room for all our electrical equipment and won’t have to pull cat hair out of our USB ports or explain our solder paste rig to a skeptical landlord ever again! If you or anybody you know is looking for office or desk space in the Central Square area have them shoot us an email, we’re hoping to fill the building with other like minded groups. There’s even a nice conference room where we can host community events and meetups!