With you on this, haha. Big tech has heavily crowded the wearables space, with questionable intentions and uses of personal health data.

Additionally, when doing research around kinetic / thermal energy harvesting technology for a wearable design project (gesture recognizing smart ring) for school, we found modules to have far too low a volumetric energy density (W/mm^3) to be useful, where size matters more than anything else.

Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as well…

>Musical instrument design is a well saturated space as well…

Yeah, thats sort of the point. :)

Big Tech may have crowded the wearables space, but Garmin is still quite a player in that field and the description "Big Tech" seems almost as bad a fit for them as "Olathe tinkerer collective" would be.

Have you ever thought of a commercial location tracking solution based off this tech? It’s another heavily, heavily crowded industry, but it has oddly high margins, and a basically-infinite battery life would be a huge selling point

Provide a way to contact you, please.

Ok, I did .. and thanks, needed to do that ..

Seems to go straight to mail subsystem delivery failure?

Fixed - sorry about that, brainfarts abound. Hope you are still interested in making contact!

I wish there was a small and affordable guitar pedal that had shimmer and bitcrush, and only that, with two potmeters and a passthrough button. I think the combination of those two effects is underused. Could it be done only with analog circuits?

By it's very definition, _bit_crush is going to be digital. Shimmer is a variation on reverb and might be possible using analog only but would be an interesting circuit.

I agree that "bits" needs to be digital, but the "bitcrusher effect" can apparently also be implemented in an analog way:

https://www.peterzimon.com/analog-bitcrusher/

Zynthian:

https://zynthian.org

Or Mod DUO:

https://mod.audio/mod-duo/

.. can both do what you want, and a ton more to boot - I know you specifically asked for simple and cheap - well, these devices are cheap and .. amazing ..

Those two projects looks excellent, thanks for the tip!

As a user, I would emphasis the importance of analogical input and feedback to musical instruments. The more analogical input means the more freedom to express nuances. Some but few electronic instruments include easy to use analogical input, with sliders, gyroscope or even the voice directly for example.

For example, the Dualo touch uses a slider and a gyroscope for analogical input:

https://dualo.com/en/dualo/

The voice recorded through a mic can also be a nice anological input, such as in the Rc-505 loop station:

https://www.boss.info/global/products/rc-505mk2/

Even better if there is an analogical feedback. For example with springs under buttons, rubber bands attached to finger rings or other crazy ideas.