I’m a long term Zynthian enthusiast and as soon as the V5 was announced for sale last on 23 August, ordered one.
I was quite surprised to see it arrive here in the US today!
The package is quite impressive, and the build took well under 2 hours.
The online assembly instructions were perfect. Only flaw (if you can consider it a flaw) was the image of the internal Rpi heatsink showed a smaller pad with no holes associated with it’s mounting to the case. No matter, the directions were clear and the assembly was obvious.
I got the unit built over a long lunch then downloaded the OS. I had expected an SD card with software included, and didn’t realize I needed to create my own until I was finished assembly and ready to boot. Again no problem other that I could have been downloading and burning the image while I was constructing the unit.
Once I got the software downloaded (DO make sure you get the correct “staging” image for the V5 unit) I unzipped and used Rufus to burn the image to an SD card on my Win 11 computer.
Loaded the card in the Zynthian, plugged in, switched on, held breath, and was greeted with a light behind a key on the keypad and an upside down Linux boot on the screen.
Once booted, the screen righted itself ans showed Zynthian along with a note it was preparing the system parameters.
A short while later (maybe 15 minutes) I saw that the screen was showing a start up screen I recognized from my early device.
At that point I needed to stop “playing” and get back to work, so I haven’t yet had a chance to connect a keyboard and see if all is working. Maybe tomorrow.
But so far, I’m impressed with the unit, it’s ease of assembly and the great packaging and instructions included. I’m looking forward to connecting a keyboard amp and speaker and actually making music!
I just got mine as well! Just built it but the image is downloading at ~150KB/s. Might want to kick up those torrents as things already seem quite busy!
Zynthian servers have TB bandwidth, and the current network load is very low. I mean, there are a few concurrent downloads (4-5) but the capacity is very far from the limit. So the problem is not “high demand” related. There should be some bottleneck between our servers and your computer.
We have tried the torrent way several times, but it requires too much effort and it’s not free from issues, so we are not going to create more torrents. Of course, if somebody want to do it, we will feed the torrents from our servers.
I have an ec2 instance with a flask app and could serve from an S3 bucket. I doubt that would cost much at all unless there was a zillion downloads. I would want it behind a login not just floating free on the net for anyone to click on.
Mine arrived a few days ago, today’s the first day I had time to build it. 3 hours later, it booted and I got it playing a few notes.
I did find burr in the heatsink tapped holes and had fun with the ribbon cables, it worked first time. Documentation online is missing in places - how do I get to the Pattern menu? I’ll figure it out, I’ll look at the Python sources.
On-line documentation is not fully updated. It’s difficult to document every change we make “just in time”. I hope it will be updated very soon. Until then you can ask all you want, of course, specially for undocumented those features.
Regarding the pattern menu, it’s a “contextual” menu so you can access it from the pattern editor by clicking the OPT button.
@jofemodo , is there any possibility of using any other shipper? I am literally sitting with my credit card in hand and I saw UPS and I generally refuse to buy stuff that uses UPS. It’s a real dilemma.
edit: the problem being, they add a good 50% of fees at least when they get to your door, always.
edit2: slept on it and got over it and placed the order. But I hate UPS like The Dude hates The fuckin’ Eagles, man.
The got really tired of managing all the shipping burden and finally start using a shipping-broker called “sendcloud” that automatically show the available shipping methods for your address. We have little control over this, sorry.
Our UPS experience is not better/worst than any other shipping company. They normally work OK and from time to time, we have some issue.
Regarding taxes, we have no control over this, sorry. We could lie in the custom declaration, declaring a lower value, but this would be a serious problem for us and for you if the package is inspected and they ask for the payment receipt, so we don’t do this kind of things and declare the 100% of product value. Really sorry about this, but we are forced by law. I tend to hate more taxes agencies & customs than shipping companies
I’m all for paying my duties and whatnot, we pay high taxes here in Canada as well, and it actually removed the 100 euro of taxes from the order after I put in my Canadian address.
Now it might work differently in Europe, because you have better laws on a lot of this kind of thing these days, but here in Canada if you get a UPS package, your choices are to either pay them an extra $30 or more, over and above all legitimate fees, which climbs based on the declared value of course,
OR
-go to UPS office in out-of-the-way industrial park during very short daytime hours
-wait half an hour for papers
-drive to customs office, pay actual duties/taxes and clear package
-drive back to UPS
-wait half an hour again for package
On the other hand, if you send through the postal service they only charge me the actual duties and taxes. So the duties are not the problem, UPS is the problem.
I am also aware that they give very sweet deals to shippers in order to capture the receivers, because I am definitely not going to drive the 1.5 hours to the city to clear it myself. I have to pay the bridge trolls. It is a measure of how much I believe in what I’m buying that I’m accepting this. You should not feed trolls, ever.
Yep! UPS charge a fee for “admin” associated with custom clearance. Since the UK left the EU we have been hit by these charges. I avoid UPS whenever possible. Other shipping agents handle this in a more customer friendly way.
I totally understand your POV, but please, consider ours:
Using standard postal services is no longer an option for us. They don’t collect the packages so …
we should take the packages to the postal office
wait for 1 hour to be attended
then wait until an inefficient “worker” re-enter all the shipping data because he/she doesn’t know how to use the system (it’s a total mess and probably it would fail anyway… ).
then pay and cross fingers, hoping the postal officer didn’t make some mismatch when re-entering by hand the shipping addresses and names. Most of packages we have lost have been lost because of this.
We should repeat this procedure several times a week or buy a bigger car because we are receiving lots of orders.
AFAIK, UPS, although being trolls (like the rest), normally works OK for most of people. Indeed, when in the past we used standard postal service for shipping packages, we received frequent requests for shipping with UPS because people from many countries didn’t trust their local postal services.
In spanish we just to say, “it never rains as everyone would like to” (nunca llueve a gusto de todos).
I understand the superior service from your end; the scheme doesn’t work without treating someone better and someone worse. The international nature of the transaction, along with the dollars involved, were also compelling to accept the UPS, though I have full confidence in Canada Post once things are in their hands.
This usually goes off into a Marxist rant but I’m on the clock. Regardless, I am extremely excited to finally have a real Zynthian on the way. :>
Speaking of shipping, I got this in an email from Frank today 2023-09-05:
My V5 Zynthian is scheduled to arrive today. They must be shipping from somewhere in USA since I just ordered it a few days ago.
And my V5s only took a few days each as well.
Is that (the guess that you ‘must’ be staging units in the USA) true, or is UPS just using fast planes?
Or does “sendcloud” just take care of details like that and you don’t even know?
I’m on the east Coast, outside Atlanta. Mine was shipped from Europe (Spain if I remember correctly) and took only a few days with DHL. I think I ordered on a Thursday, unit was packed on a Friday and shipped, and I had it by Wednesday the next week.
