What happened to RetroWave OPL3?

You may heard of our RetroWave OPL3, it's a Yamaha OPL3 sound card in the shape of a RaspberryPi HAT, and aimed to work with modern computers. It was demonstrated by LTT ShortCircuit and LGR. You might also be angry with us because you still haven't received your order. I will get these covered in this article.

All the RetroWave series boards (including the unreleased ones) use the Microchip MCP23S17 SPI I/O expander chip. It supports the key functionality of the RetroWave: stacking. You can stack at most 8 different or same RetroWave boards together, and each one will work on their own - you can create a "Retro Synth Tower" in this way.

However, producing & selling it was not an easy job.

In very early of this year (2022), we received about 100 orders. As we already found the delay of chip shipping is becoming more and more common, we ordered 2000 pcs of MCP23S17 from Microchip back in September 2021, and we expected the first 500 of them to be delivered to us around February 2022. And the problem is: they didn't, even after 5 months. As a result, we were running out of the MCP23S17 chips and unable to produce these orders immediately.

At first, we were just waiting for them. But we haven't received any updates from Microchip in the first half of February. I started to feel things were starting to go wrong. Yes, it was - we wanted to buy these chips from other sources, but it was already too late. The price of this chip was going ridiculously high at this moment, and it's even higher when I searched it again at the time of writing (2022-06-21).

And that's not all, the worst thing is yet to come - The Shanghai Lockdown. I can't comment on it, but please do Google by your own hands to see what it's like. Almost all global chip companies have their main China offices in Shanghai, including TI, Microchip, NXP, Mouser, DigiKey, and a lot more. Since we use a lot of imported chips on our products (for their reliability), including DIY/maker products such as the RetroWave OPL3, and more importantly, products and solutions designed for our industrial customers. This effectively disrupted our company's operations in every aspect. We lost a lot of money in this process, and we are practically near bankrupt - it's also the same for thousands of other small and medium-sized enterprises here.

However we didn't just gave up. We proposed an alternative solution in April via email, and it's called the "RetroWave OPL3 Express". It's quite simple: the OPL3, and a MCU, nothing more. You connect it to your computer via USB and it works.

Thankfully, some of our customers replied and most of them accepted the solution. But that's only a quarter of the people who ordered. Most of our customers didn't reply the email. It's more likely they never seen it. This may explain why some of them are so angry with us, we did attempt to solve this problem, but email is the only way for us to initiate communication with the customers.

Despite the fact of we're running of money, we designed and produced these alternative solution boards as fast as we can, and it took a month and a half. And they're shipped to all customers, including those who didn't reply the email, but excluding those who explicitly stated they will wait for the original RetroWave OPL3 forever, at 2022-06-10.

But here comes yet another problem. The selling platform - Tindie, was not happy for what we were doing. Apparently they believed every seller on their platform ought to be done producing the items before selling them, but honestly I didn't remember this was actually a rule prior to opening a shop on it.

And what's even worse, they accepted some customer's refund request without asking us, after we already shipped the alternative solution boards. This happened more than once, even after we explicitly told them that we've already shipped all the packages. What annoyed us most is that, one customer's package has already arrived at its destination country three days ago, the customer requested refund, and they ... issued it immediately even without asking for our opinions. We have already reproduced all boards on our own money and we're already loosing money just to fulfill these orders, yet these refunds made us loose even more.

Another funny thing about Tindie is, our products never went on the Tindie Blog, despite the fact that even they're reviewed by more than one famous YouTube channels. I'm not saying that our products are so good that they must write a blog post about them, but even a simple breakout board of several RGB LEDs can arrive on it with the most gorgeous praises.

So why do we still bother selling on Tindie? We almost have no positive experiences with them. We are not a charity, we expected to make a living by selling our products on Tindie, but the reality is pushing us to the opposite direction.

And here's the conclusion:

• The inability to ship orders on time is our fault, but it was totally out of control
• We think we fulfilled our duty to the customers
• Tindie is ignoring sellers' difficulties and only caring about their profits

If you're one of the customers:

• We're always open to suggestions and questions
• Please don't request refund unless you're willing to return the package to us

Thank you for your patience reading this article. And yet still, hope you can still understand our situation.