Author’s note

This post was recovered from my old blog via the Wayback Machine. It has been edited for grammar. I was really glad to find this post, I’d forgotten about this idea. I designed a prototype that would plug in to your iPod (this was pre-iPhone) and let you play drums or strum guitar to your favorite songs. I didn’t know how to build hardware then, so this never really got off the ground. It’s funny now to look back on this, it actually might have been a successful product. I remember really enjoying the time I spent in Photoshop designing the product and getting the mockup to look like an Apple ad. Maybe this should’ve been a sign that I was a better product designer than I was a hardware engineer.

@jbnunn

25-Sept 2022

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Abandoned Dreams: The iRoadie - Jan 8 2007

If you’re like me (let’s hope this isn’t the case), you’ve started a lot of projects and never seen them through to completion. I’ve given up on more ideas than I care to mention – many more than I can remember. A lot of them were whimsical, but every once in a while one came along that really might have been good. Enter “iRoadie.” It was July, 2004, and while listening to an iPod I wondered how cool it would be to add your own drumline or guitar riff to a song while you were sitting there listening to it.

iRoadie was my idea for a series of iPod addons that get you “squealing lead solos along with your favorite metal song in no time,” or “pounding the drumline to your favorite anthems…”. Usually, my projects start with a rough layout or graphical design. I made a mockup of the iRoadie in Photoshop, complete with an Apple-styled preview.

I registered iRoadie.com (which I’ve since let slip away), but never put anything up there. I really intended on doing something with this project, but have no electronic skills or any type of hardware knowledge that would help me build the units. So, I found a cheap children’s electric drumkit/keyboard combo on eBay, and disassembled it using a soldering iron and screwdriver when it came in. My initial goal was to just get the pieces of the drumkit working and playing through the iPod’s headphone port, but I didn’t even make to that point before the dream fizzled. And that fizzling is what ends most of my ideas. Maybe you can make it work for you…

- @jbnunn