About
Build the panel, skip the PCB
Rodeo is a host board and a family of control satellites for people who can write DSP but do not want to design a control-surface PCB to hear it through knobs. You pick the controls, chain them together, and write the code. The circuit board problem is already solved.
Who
A one-person company
Rodeo is built by DOT RODEO LLC, a one-person company in Maine. Every board here was designed and routed by the same person writing the build log — which is the reason that log exists, and the reason this site is careful to say what has been measured on hardware and what has only been drawn.
It also sets expectations honestly. A one-person hardware project moves at the pace of one person. The build log is where that pace is visible, including the parts that went wrong.
Licensing
Open, in three parts
All of Rodeo is open source, under three licences chosen so the platform can be built into other products — open or closed — while the Rodeo designs themselves stay open.
- Hardware
- CERN-OHL-W-2.0
- KiCad projects, Gerbers, BOMs, placement files, panel and mechanical files
- Software
- MIT
- rodeo-sdk, the firmware trees and the KiCad tooling
- Documentation
- CC-BY-SA-4.0
- every Markdown file and docs folder in the repository
What the hardware licence actually requires. Anyone may build, modify and sell Rodeo hardware. If you modify a Rodeo design and distribute it, your modified design files must be published under the same licence.
Products that use Rodeo boards, or connect to them through their published interfaces, do not have to be open. That boundary is deliberate — CERN-OHL-W is weakly reciprocal precisely so that building a closed product on top of Rodeo is allowed.
Third-party components keep their own licences — libDaisy and DaisySP are MIT from Electrosmith, and DaisySP's LGPL module is LGPL-2.1. The name “Rodeo” and its logo are not covered by these licences and may not be used to brand a derivative product.
Follow it?
Rodeo goes to Kickstarter in January 2027. The waitlist hears first, and the build log arrives as it is written.