From the beloved Emilie Gillet, founder of Mutable Instruments was born a massive collection of amazing eurorack modules, but as of late with production winding down, certain sought after modules have gone permanently out of stock. The Mutable Instruments project throughout its course has been open source, and their more recent sought after modules such as Stages, their multichannel function generator, has not had any more OEM stock. I went ahead and took it upon myself to use the open source documents for the PCB layout / schematic and panel dimensions and fabbed my own pcb / panel set through JLCPCB. I really took creative freedom to design my own black / gold panel design with matching anodized knuts from Befaco. With a rather large order of parts, I put together 5 mutable stages and sold all but two.

This was my first 0402 build and with time I powered through the TSSOP and LQFP packages, along with all the passives. As there was no precompiled firmware .hex file online for Stages that I could find, I took the time to set up the Mutable dev enviromnet via vagrant/virtualbox to setup a linux VM capable of compiling the source code and bootloader. This part sucked the most but really opened my eyes to the command line and compilation. Was not an easy feat but after making two I got pretty routine with the rest. Solder paste and stencils go a long way. Even got to link two stages together and see the bootloader recognize the connection on the back, connecting 6 stages to another 6.