Hi, been a hot minute. I decided last night that I would try to make a complete timeline of the entire history of soundboard evolution, starting at the release of the original trilogy. However, it’s a very large undertaking and since I’ve only been in the hobby a few years I’m missing a lot of knowledge about the older iterations of boards and the weird one-off boards at the very beginning of the soundboard boom.
It’s very early on in the process so I only have a draft of up until approx. 2003, which is from what I can tell, the start of the major soundboard innovation. I’ve tried looking on old forum posts from around the time period but the earliest I’ve been able to find is from 2005.
If anyone has information, dates, or general knowledge of the progression of boards and saber customization, assistance and feedback is greatly appreciated. I can also include a link to the timeline editor if you wish to add information yourself, but it does require an account, but it has a free version which I’m using and it works just fine.
Thanks for your time, this is a bit of an undertaking and I’m just one guy with lots of other responsibilities so I can’t research this 24/7 lol
I’m reading through this and looking at the Smoothswing V2 demos. At the time, what other boards had smooth swing? Was this the first instance of smoothswing on a saber?
Thexter was first with everything smoothswing, he invented it and added it to a teensy based board sandwich that he put together himself. Before that, there was no smoothswing.
Once he showed how it was done, I was able to add it to ProffieOS fairly quickly, which means that all the teensysabers could be upgraded to support smoothswing V2. I think the CFX was the the first mass-market board to do smoothswing that didn’t run ProffieOS. Looks like that came out mid 2019:
I started on a Nano Biscotte V2. At the time there was also the Crystal focus which was available to everyone, and the Crystal Shard which was only available to pro builders like Rob (Madcow) from TCSS. After a great deal of waiting and stalking the web I got a Crystal Focus 8.
The main competitor was Naigon’s Electronics in the DIY universe, with the Ignitor and the Spark. Darth Alice
was building customs with those as the center piece.
There were many other great early custom builders ofcourse.
Plecter Labs’ and NEC’s website should have a lot of the release date history of these ‘early’ boards that were considered the gold standard prior to smoothswing.
