I'm currently organizing a group order for the Aurora 224. If you are interested in buying a fully assembled or DIY kit please email me at:

blandolina@gmail.com

Unfortunately not enough people ordered last time around, they struggled to get 50. It was in part due to the payment system Aurora was using. Google checkout could only receive payments within a week and it just didn't seem to work out. However this time around there is a huge amount of interest so lets get behind this thing and make it work. We are trying to drum up at least 50 prospective buyers before we move forward with orders. We need 50 to make production viable, the pricing will be reduced in future orders once we get more volume of orders happening.

Help us get this thing off the ground and be one of the first in the world to have this cool and unique device! We all saw the Monome take off as a free source DIY midi controller, there's no reason the Aurora can't have a similar success. Monome's sell on Ebay for MEGA $$$ these days!

So far I believe the pricing is as follows:

$325-$375USD for a complete assembled device.

$250USD for the DIY kit.

Again email me if you want one and jump on the forum to express your interest or ask a question:

http://www.auroramixer.com/forum

blandolina@gmail.com

-Cheers

Auroa have done an extremely good job of this in their design in that they have come up with something beautiful, in-fact probably the most beautiful controller,

using materials & methods which do not require large investments in tooling, yet still allow easy or economical construction.[/quote]

For those of you that don't know him, MidiFidler is our resident hardware expert and this guys really knows his stuff. Well put commentary!

maybe this will give you the controller you are looking for.

I concur with your feelings here. The Auroa is however a boutique controller like the Monome. While the Monome now has a cult following the reason it succeeded in the first place is because it was totally unique and presented a paradigm shift in control surfaces, this justified the extremely high cost of the Monome series to the consumer.

While the Auroa has some forwards thinking design in its layout functionally it is still just reinventing the wheel.

However you suggest that the way that Auroa can overcome their problems is to create an additional platter style control, which you assume is easy as you have seen some posts on various ways people have achieved this on the Terminator X website.

Herein lies the fault in your logic, just because a couple of clever enthusiasts have created these at home does not mean that this could succeed commercially without a (very) large investment in tooling. The concept of a rotary encoder which spits out midi data is simple, as is Midi control in general, what makes commercializing controllers difficult is the mechanical element which is intrinsically tied to manufacturing.

Any mechanical component with a complex geometry you utilize in your design that is not an already commercially available part, is going to either going to be expensive as it will have to be hand made, or you are going to have to tool up, from an accounting perspective this up-front tooling cost must be split across each component manufactured so while the raw material and labor cost may be low if you cant achieve economy of scale the part is still expensive.

This is why they chose not to use the engraved top plate

When manufacturing a consumer product at volume the mechanical design must also be centered around making the product easy to assemble, otherwise labor will become the greatest fixed component in the cost.

Auroa have done an extremely good job of this in their design in that they have come up with something beautiful, in-fact probably the most beautiful controller,

using materials & methods which do not require large investments in tooling, yet still allow easy or economical construction.