IP & assets

Exactly what is on the table.

An honest inventory, and an honest list of what is unfinished. A technical reviewer will find the second list in an afternoon, so it is here rather than in a disclosure schedule.

The core asset

U.S. utility patent — granted

The patent covers the instrumented plectrum itself: a pick that senses what the player does to it and reports that wirelessly. It is granted, and it sits in a category that connected-instrument makers have been moving toward from every other direction — the guitar, the amplifier, the tuner, the practice app — while the pick, the one object in constant contact with the playing hand, stayed dumb.

The claim is the defensible position. The hardware and firmware around it are what turn that position into a product that can be shipped in a year rather than researched for three.

Status

Granted

A granted United States utility patent. The number, full specification, prosecution history and assignment records are provided with the data room on request.

Inventory

Everything that transfers

Five groups. The first is the legal position; the rest are the reason the legal position is worth something.

Intellectual property

U.S. utility patent — granted: Granted. Covers the instrumented plectrum — sensing what the player applies to the pick and reporting it wirelessly.
Pickatto name and marks: Brand, logo and visual identity, with the press record attached to the name.
Domain and web presence: pickatto.com and the associated social accounts.

Hardware design

Rev 3.3 schematic and PCB: KiCad project, with the EAGLE originals it was imported from.
Bill of materials: Fitted parts by reference designator, as assembled.
Fabrication outputs: Gerbers and stencil files, kept as the archives a fabricator would be sent.
Netlist: Short enough to read end to end, and the authoritative reference for what connects to what.
Per-pin wiring reference: A walkthrough of every processor pin and what it drives.
Datasheets: For every fitted part, including two that exist only as scans.
Revision history: Rev 2, 3.1 and 3.2 schematics, and a documented Rev 3.4 change set not yet fabricated.

Firmware

Application firmware: Rust on Embassy over Nordic’s SoftDevice: feature-complete, hardware-verified, with host test suites for every portable component. This is the maintained line.
Bootloader and SoftDevice: The update mechanism itself, with a byte-reproducible build and a verification hash.
Wire protocol definitions: Protocol-buffer message definitions, with golden-byte encoding tests on the firmware side and a decoder on the app side tested against an encoder built to omit zero-valued fields — the case a lazily-written test misses.
Signing keys: The firmware signing key that fielded bootloaders validate against — transferred with the asset, and not replaceable on devices already in the field.

APP

Companion application

Flutter app, iOS and Android: Connect a pick, choose a song, play it while the tab scrolls, and get every stroke scored on timing and direction. One codebase, both platforms.
The scoring engine: Timing windows, stroke matching and the judgement buckets, with an injectable clock so the whole judging path is covered by host tests rather than by playing at it.
Grip classification: A smoothing filter, a learned baseline and banding with hysteresis — no Flutter dependency, and tunable from a screen in the app against a live reading.
Tab rendering: A painted scrolling staff with tempo marks, count-in and a metronome driven off the playhead rather than its own timer.
Demonstrable without hardware: Tap pads feed strokes through the same path a real pick does, so the product can be shown, developed and tested from a simulator.

OPS

Tooling and documentation

macOS bench tool: Streaming, logging, service inventory, labelled capture recording, update triggering and a dashboard, over the Mac’s own radio.
Captured pluck recordings: Labelled high-rate motion captures taken from real playing — the seed of a training set.
Engineering documentation: Long-form notes per repository: startup constraints, bus faults and their symptoms, errata and the behaviour that exists because of them.
Release procedure: How a signed update is built, versioned and delivered, including the traps that brick a unit.

Diligence

Known issues and open work

Nothing below is a surprise to us, and none of it is undocumented internally. Each item names what is wrong, how well it is understood, and whose job it would be to close.

01Rev 3.3 starts from the charger, not from the battery alone

Known · root-caused · fix identified

A pick that has powered down does not switch itself back on from its own cell: the voltage detector in the enable network releases at or above the voltage of a full cell, so the power latch never asserts on battery alone. Connecting the charger takes the rail above that threshold and the pick comes on normally, so this is a start-up behaviour rather than a dead unit — but it means a fully discharged pick has to be plugged in to wake, which is not what a shipped consumer product should require. It was traced to the detector’s own datasheet after three revisions of reasoning from convention, and the correction is one line of the bill of materials plus one net. It is a hardware change, firmware cannot work around it, and it is written up in full with the evidence for an external electrical engineer to action.

02Battery life is what keeps a pick usable between charges

Addressed in firmware

When the fuel gauge crosses its low-charge threshold the rail drops and the pick switches off until it is charged again. Since the device also needs the charger to restart, a pick left in a case and quietly draining is a worse experience than the same pick simply going flat in use. The documented idle power policy is the answer: after two minutes with no movement and no connected phone, every sensor and the radio stand down, and a quarter of a g brings them back.

03A sealed unit has no recovery path but over-the-air update

By design · constrains release process

There is no accessible debug header after assembly, so an application that fails before it advertises cannot be recovered. This is a real constraint on how releases are made rather than a defect, and the release procedure, the signature and CRC validation, and the rules about what may never fail on a startup path all exist to honour it.

04The companion app is new, and has not been through an app store

Disclosed · built, not published

The Flutter app is complete enough to connect a pick, run a scored practice session and report on it, and it runs on iOS and Android. It has not been submitted to either store, has no accounts, sync or payment, and ships three built-in songs rather than a library. The grip thresholds it bands against are spaced to be plausible rather than measured — nobody has yet put a pick on a bench and recorded what a comfortable grip actually does to the sensor — and the app carries a tuning screen built for exactly that session.

05No volume manufacturing has been run

Disclosed

Boards have been fabricated and assembled in small quantities and the design is in a state a contract manufacturer can quote against. Production tooling, enclosure tooling at volume, certification testing and a factory provisioning flow are work a buyer would undertake.

What this list is meant to show

Every one of these was found by instrumenting the real device and reading the evidence, not by guessing — and each is recorded with the evidence that settled it. A buyer is acquiring that habit along with the files. It is the difference between a technology that works on the bench and one somebody else can pick up.

Structure

We are open on how this is done.

The preference is a clean sale of the whole package. Other structures are workable if they get the technology to someone who will ship it.

Outright acquisition

Preferred

Patent, designs, firmware, the companion app, keys, tooling and documentation, assigned in full. Transition support from the people who built it, for an agreed period.

Exclusive licence

Alternative

Exclusive rights in a field of use or territory, with the technology package delivered on the same terms and the patent retained.

Acqui-hire or partnership

Open

If the right owner wants the people as well as the files, that is a conversation worth having. The engineering knowledge is real and transfers best in person.

Acquisition & licensing

Ask for the data room.

Under NDA: the patent file, the full hardware package, the firmware repositories, the errata write-ups, and a call with the engineers. No obligation to proceed, and no pressure if it is not a fit.

Request the data room See the asset inventory