Right. No point replacing it unless I figure out why it blew in the first place.
With brave @keymanpal help We found out it is an ic marked with
BATI
BBQ
I can’t find a chip wit that name. Does anyone have a clue what this is?
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It seems that the Mac i used is to be boamed for this
It fried one of my extermal disk drives.
Can’t risk plugging anything into it unless I get a chance to bring it to the Apple store
Just heads up - make sure you check this before plugging your valuable devices in
This is the last Mac before the M1 came out I think.
ohh not good; something is not right there.
So, all USB-C…
It does frighten me, voltage wise, what comes out of a Mac USB-C.
Yes. Just heads up for everyone. Seems I’m not the only one
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Ouch, that’s not good … sorry to hear !
Update: I’ll have a direct support call with Apple today regarding this and will let you all know the result
Seems they’re aware of this issue with this particular model. This is a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro
Told me to stop using or charging it until we talk so it seems serious.
Side note: Based on this - seems that part of power distribution is fried but impossible to fix because I still don’t know what the chip in question is. Maybe a seasoned hardware expert could just identify it if it’s some kind of common power distribution
If anyone knows one and shares the pictures with him - that may help me so… if you do have someone like that please ask them and let me know
Cheers
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autchhh, I have one - served me well; battery is gone by now; it has been my main machine, now transitioning to M1 Pro MBP
I have someone I trust all gear but… he is on vacation, have to wait a bit before I dare to “upset” him 
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I hope this isn’t too late to be of use, but I did open up my Tau trying to get it to work again, which I wrote about here:
The first point is, because of this calibration issue, any opening of any Eigenharp is a great opportunity to publicly document as much of the internals as possible, so kudos for those pictures! With enough information, some problems might be able to be solved without having to open a “virgin” instrument. If yours is still open, I second Mark’s request for more pictures 
Second, when I did finally get the Tau working again, I did not notice any calibration problems and the keys seemed to respond as before. I was very careful to avoid disturbing anything relating to the keys but if you read the above thread, some was inevitable. There could have been a small change that was too small for me to notice though. Based on the Tau board, I can see how differing pressures on it (e.g. slightly different torque on screws while reassembling) could cause small deflection differences on individual unloaded keys that could be compensated for.
I’ll end with a question, have you or anyone else made contact with John lately? If there was one message in a bottle I could get across, it would be to please open as much of the remaining engineering details as possible (protocols, instrument and basestation firmware, etc) so that we diehard fans can get the most mileage out of them.
The next best thing would be to be able to get them repaired and/or recalibrated but I’m not even sure if anyone has been able to do that recently.
-Josh
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Haven’t tried to reach John lately, thus don’t know about his availability.
Did you hear back from Wayne Nelson, the Eigenlabs technician mentioned in the linked thread?
Nope, never did. I did get through to Mark Rigamonti (he did the mechanical design) at a newer email but he didn’t have any info either. He said he’d also try to contact Wayne and get back to me but I never heard back. That was nearly 2 years ago.
Not only is eigenlabs.com down again but so is johnhenrylambert.com (hence the internet archive link above).
ok 
Fingers crossed that everything is ok!
The Eigenlabs website and John’s homepage are back up! 
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eingenlabs is down again, been trying to access the site to get the tutorials on how to work with workbench and locanto if anyone has that info id be happy lol.
Keep trying, it seems to wink in and out of existence regularly. Next time it’s up I’d recommend downloading everything you think you’ll need.
@thetechnobear how sure are we that the Alpha/Tau don’t support reading the calibration? Looking at lib_alpha2/alpha2_usb.h, there is a hole between
#define BCTKBD_USBCOMMAND_CALWRITE_REQ 0xb6
and
#define BCTKBD_USBCOMMAND_CALCLEAR_REQ 0xb8
that is exactly where you’d expect to find the 0xb7 read command that is in lib_pico/pico_usb.h.
(Actually @gbevin might know also, I see commits from him in the Pico firmware binary.)
If it is there, it would be theoretically possible to write a recalibration tool that could be used to save the existing calibration to a backup, and make relative adjustments to a particular key through trial and error (or restore from the backup if needed). I could really use that to fix the bad key on mine, since I never got any responses from Eigenlabs about servicing.
-Josh
reading the calibration data is not the issue…
iirc, we actually have some info on this side, including some hints in the source code of how this might be stored…
but none of it is really enough, as we have no information on the calibration process (either mechanical or software side)
Im sure we some hacking we could get “something”, but there would be a risk of corrupting calibration data to the point of non-recovery, making the device unusable.
so, its just not worth the risk… ‘dabbling’ with it whilst knowing we are to some extent grasping at straws.
thats just my opinion, having looked at all the code that existing in the repo related to calibration, including the few ‘tools’ that exist.
(afaik, Geert worked on EigenD only, not the firmware, which we dont even have source for… so not quite sure what you mean)
I was referring to e.g. this commit on the Pico firmware itself, can’t see how he would have done that except by building the firmware from sources:
It’s a binary commit from those that develop the firmware, it’s just being stored in repo … as that’s the way the eigenharp software is shipped.
I know the firmware was done ‘externally’ , as I discussed this with Jim ( the principle dev for Eigenharp) when talking about firmware support for midi for the basestation ( used by Alpha and Tau)
Afaik, It’s pretty specialize hardware on the instruments themselves , not something a non specialist has skills or tools to write.
This doesn’t actually matter … as the firmware is only for the low level protocol, so 99.9% functionality we see is within the Eigend code base running on your computer.
But that does mean, if the read ‘op-code’ is not present, then we have no access to data.
But as I said , even if it does … that’s not the main issue.
the pico does have the read op. code, and it was still unclear what’s exactly there eg we only have a vague idea what that data stream format actually is.
But again, I’m not saying impossible … if i spent alot of time on it, I’m sure I’d could get a little further - but doesn’t feel worth it ( to me!)
the fried chip was named BBQ? it is the sacrificial lamb of the board, amazing.