smashtv

Thanks M! I have not handled this well at all, and I have been pacing a hole in the floor here just thinking about the missed release date... :-\ The boards are in process at the fab, and in the worst-case scenario won't be here until March 10th, but I do expect them sooner....My buy contract with the fab guys allows them extra days in case they have issues, and that's where the March 10th date comes from. In past orders from them though, they have never taken all the time allowed by the purchase order, and usually finish and ship much faster than expected. When they do finish they will ship from there to here via overnight fedex. I could have fed a large village of people for a year on just the crazy shipping cost alone.... Instead of whining to you all about the endless small delays, Let me say that the wait has been entirely my fault. If I had done this in December we would be playing with the new stuff now.... :-[ All that aside refunds are available to anyone waiting, and those who have waited so patiently will get extra connectors and ribbon cable with your order so you can start building immediately without having to chase more parts....Whether you ordered them or not. My "work in progress" docs for the new CORE can be seen here http://www.avishowtech.com/mbhp/mbhp_coreR4.html, my apologies for the bad photoshop work on the render (I'm not a CAD guy!). And i'm open for any questions about what has changed, why I did xx, etc. Any questions and suggestions will help me improve the docs for these, so let me know what you think.... I'm checking for ship status on the boards automatically, As soon as they leave China I'll post here and follow their journey. Thanks again for your understanding on the wait, and if you are as frustrated as I am with it please yell at me a bit to vent, it's healthy. Best Regards Smash PS: M's comment above about Las Vegas was re: a comment I made in the IRC chat about having a price on my head, "these guys probably think I fled to Mexico with the pre-order money" No Vegas or Mexico for me..... :)

You completely misunderstood my comment, I am not a homophobe. I was only trying to point out that his statements about his gay-ness have no relevance whatsoever to this issue, and you should be wondering why your only ally here thinks this is the place for that discussion....He's trolling for a reaction to anything, pure and simple. I could really care less if he plays for the other team, quite a few of my good freinds do. Or maybe you don't misunderstand, and your position here is so futile that you welcome any help even if they dilute your argument into oblivion.... So what's next? The race card? Sorry son, you have no choice but to bother with me, as I have been here for years and I'll still be here when you are gone. ;) Did you ever stop to think, if this were the right thing to do, why the other 5000 members of this community have not done it already? If you really want to bring this down to some personal argument,I'll lock this thread and we can move to a private chat.....But don't call me something I'm not.

From where, the college lab? Your desperation to argue is funny to me, along with the fact that your gay lifestyle only seems to be a problem for you, yet you keep trying to make it an issue when irrelevant. blah blah whatever, you need to look somewhere else for a fight. I hope you really trust in rah's business practices, since now you will be co-defendants assuming either of you can manage anything better than a hot-glue constructed SID on eBay.

The whole concept and the fact that it is released with the rule of "no commercial use". All of your arguments are seriously flawed if you don't regognize that ALL of this is IP owned by Thorsten. He's just nice enough to share with anyone without profiteering goals. What work exactly? MIOS, the bootloader, all of it. It's his work, and his right to restrict its commercial use. The GPL does not give that right away, no matter how you try to read it. Maybe in the absense of the "no commercial use" statement found here, but since that was said, any legal commercial use requires TK's permission. Again please ask a real attorney about this stuff! Because you asked? Great, care to fill us in on exactly what you resolved, so we don't have to continue to guess your intention as it changes? What is your plan today, for profit or not? Fine, that's your opinion. I'm ready to test it in court, are you? Check yourself on "there would seem"......Please get a real lawyer to help clarify this whole issue for you, it's not my job to teach you about business law in the real world. Test my arguments with real professionals, and they will all tell you it's enough to win an infringement case. Besides, I can "legally " tie you up in court for as long as needed, all other arguments about legal and right and wrong aside....Since I obviously can't put the spirit of this community in words you can understand. So you have a choice, cheap lesson now, or expensive lesson later. SmashTV

You are getting confused here. Infringement starts when you use someone else's design for your own product without their permission. With the MIDIbox you need two things to keep you out of court, GPL compliance AND Thorstens express written permission. Set the GPL aside for a moment and remember Thorsten still owns real copyrights on HIS work, and by extension the trade dress of any derivites. No interpretation of the GPL can change this. Please consult a real IP attorney soon on this stuff, not just advice from the net! I can't answer this completely (I'm not Thorsten), But I have a few guesses: I started with asking permission, not any statement of intent about what I was going to do with other people's work. I re-designed the layouts to make them more "home-etch" freindly (community) I still answer many build-related questions via email and private msg. (community) I don't profiteer. Know any other projects with $5 pro boards? Didnt think so. Anyone with simple math skills knows profit is not my motive here. Answers to your last few questions are easily found by doing a forum search. Been discussed ad nauseam years ago. ;) SmashTV

Well see that's a problem....You have to use those words when you open your source. A trademark is part of your trade dress, and if you do a little reasearch into judgements of cases on IP you will find trade dress as the start and end to many suits. Do you honestly think it's alright to erase the name from something and sell it as your own? Let me first clear up your question....I sell MIDIbox related products, while you are proposing to sell finished MIDIboxes. There is a fundamental difference. A quick forum search from years ago would turn up the answers for this question, but I'll repeat here for clarity: 1) I started by asking Thorsten's permission, and he granted it. Not that there needs to be a number 2, but: 2) I only sell components, not complete modules or boxes. Smash

Yay for you, now we all fully understand your contempt for this community and we can kill file your posts accordingly. Do you remember saying this: in this post? I remember.... were you lying then or now? /edit turned off the flamethrower (quit taking the flamebait Smash!) ;)

Ok I grow weary of this, so time for the gloves to come off. Hi Robert, I'm SmashTV, nice to meet ya. I came to swing the hammer of logic down on your little enterprise real quick. No offense, nothing personal, etc.... Just me job. ;) Yeah isnt it great! We love it and bring much love to Thorsten for sharing it with us. ;D Too bad for your little business plan that you don't have the non-open source bootloader code that MIOS requires to run. Hope you are sparky with the assembler, otherwise it might take you a while to write a two stage bootloader that will work. Check your info resources for the term "infringement of trade dress". I have several thousand examples of the word MBHP printed on my PCBs, that is considered legally (in both of our countries) to be part of the trade dress of my "product". MBHP can be easily proven to specifically mean MIDI Box Hardware Platform in court. I had my lawyers check that stuff out, sounds like you could benefit from the advice of an IP attorney yourself. Now let me suggest this analogy for the spirit of the MIDIbox: Free beer night at the local pub does not mean you bring in an empty 5 gallon drum, get it filled, then go re-sell it in the parking lot. And with that logic further applied to the MIDIbox: If you bring a drum full of good beer you made yourself, the bartender might encourage you to sell it in the parking lot because his regulars like new beer, as long as you don't overcharge for your beer and show the others how you make it so they can do the same. Any shady dealing will likely get the bouncers after you though, considering the bartender gave you the knowledge to make your own beer in the first place. Well, That's all the time I have for this, time to get back to bothering the guys in China (are they ready yet? are they ready yet?) SmashTV

It's been quite broken for a while now, I'll ditch it soon, after everything is moved to the new one.... Then new wiki http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki is it's replacement, it's not broken. ;) With the new wiki, use your existing forum username/password to login/create/edit (thanks Twin-X!) Best Regards Smash

hehe thanks Therezin! ;D I'm converting the new core, din, dout, ain, and aoutlc layouts to gerber right now. They will probably be making silkscreens for these within the next 24 hours 7194 miles (11578 km) away. <--Still trips me out... ;) I'll do my best to hammer out a reasonable deal for quickturn service, and hopefully it won't come all that way here to get stopped for extra days by customs in Kentucky..... I'm just hoping I won't need a flux capacitor module and a well timed lightning bolt (1.21 gigawatts?!?) to get the boards in my hand on the 23rd.... :-\ Best Smash

Thanks guys! :)

Not impatient at all! I have had some unforseen issues that have kept me away from getting everything finalized and tested. From wrenching on my wife's car to the spam attack (15,000+ per hour for a while) to the realization that my only remaining SID chip (for testing) was dead, it's been a wild ride.... :-\ With those issues corrected, I'm finally back to a few hours with Eagle to finalize things on the new stuff, time at the bench to test the new stuff, time to turn a lot of bulk parts into some fresh SID kits, and pack some orders....Thinking of changing my profile to "not waving, drowning!" for a little while.... ;) That said..... I have a large stack of orders here packed and ready to go out, I'll be either making a late postal run tonight or an early run tomorrow. When I say large stack I mean every order that is not waiting on the new boards is packed and ready. The new SID boards are done and here, have been well tested by me and others, and I'll have some kits done to ship with them in the next few hours. The bad part of that story is the matching CORE is not done yet. While the difference is only a wiring change as covered in the forum posts about this, it's a bummer to not have both in and at the same time. :( I'm doing my absolute best to keep with the date on the 23rd, but I'm way into my "safety zone" and any delay with fab or shipping will cause the date to slide, and that's assuming I can have everything done and cleaned up and tested over the next day. I know a lot of you guys have been waiting too long already, and that really weighs on me. :( The changes are basically a mix from a list of every suggestion builders have made over the last few years (including bypass caps on everything), changes I have made to make the build quicker/cut errors(PCB mount MIDI jacks on the CORE). More info on the CORE soon, some early info/photos of the new SID here http://www.avishowtech.com/mbhp/mbhp_SIDR3.html Seems the confirmation emails still are not making it out, so I'll update the status and buy pages again tomorrow and try again from my Gmail account. Thanks for your patience, time to coffee up and get back to it.... ;) Best Regards SmashTV

http://www.cesko.host.sk/IgorPlugUSB/IgorPlug-USB%20(AVR)_eng.htm

Whee! Although images of wild otaku are common, a photo of one showing his sandwich fighting skills is rare indeed! ;D Thank God this fanclub does not get together and hang out dressed like Thorsten and Moebius :P

It's just some self-built hardware and a qbasic exe knocked up on a slow day at work (back in the coinop tech days)... I would not call it an analyzer at all, it really is more of a multichannel logic probe (with latching). I built it to speed troubleshooting on digital pinball machines, where I could stop the clock at will to observe states. This box made finding a switch wiring/diode fault in a 70-280 switch matrix much easier to pinpoint. ;) The design would not be good at all on anything you could not freeze the clock, or where timing is relevant at all (pretty much everything!) I wrote test roms for most of the WPC series of machines to display I/O and exercise the drive matrix, and that put me on top of the game until I quit that biz. 5 rom chips fit in the tool kit way better than my probe thing too.... ;) I miss wrenching on the pinballs sometimes.... :'( Best! Smash

I have a small army of "doorstop"(P2-133) PCs here doing the stuff that my macs don't like... Two drive different CNC machines (much tinkering to keep wintendo from interrupting the ports)... One has IC-prog and MIOS Studio, That one with it's JDM has spawned thousands of MIDIboxes as a PIC burner... One is set up for AVR development, with a STK500 dev board and extensions connected. It has mostly collected dust since I came across the MB several years ago... One is set up with no hard drive (has eeprom drive) that matches the SBC lighting controllers I have built (gathering dust too, last change in firmware was to add some fixtures that are a bit off the DMX timing spec. early last year) Whoop almost forgot the one on the bench that works as a 32 channel logic probe and is interfaced to my Fluke 45 for burn-in testing of various things. I'm planning to add a custom MIDIbox test rig and harness to this one, so I can help some of the guys who get truly stuck while building. Cool thing is I bought all of these systems (and a few spares, including one I actually use for a doorstop) including 15" monitors for $100 about 5 years ago. If I had a 600+mhz duron doorstop here, it would become a tivo replacement within a few hours, recording all the kids shows with as many tuner cards as it could cope with....... ;) Considering all the spam and DDOS attacks on me lately I'm considering loading two network cards in one to bring it up as a linux firewall..... Anyone else harnessing the massive power of a doorstop in an odd way? ;D Best! Smash

;) hehe I almost forgot that I do speak some Engrish does that count? :) Nothing racist intended in any way, its just -really- funny to me sometimes the translation errors that happen.....As a game tech in the golden age of coin operated arcade games, there were some really crazy ones in the tech documentation. I had to ask an old guru friend of mine what "pain boo" meant on a Chinese harness schematic, he said, "plain blue wire, with no stripe"..... ;D And to be fair I could have been taking (sleeping through?) French or Spanish class instead of coding in the computer lab or building the "ringer" science fair projects to win the district budget money for hours a day.... ;) ;D

Since nobody stepped up and answered about the error, I fixed audiocommander's K this morning. ;) I'll defer any other K changes to TK and the boys, since I don't trust babelfish to tell me if what sonicwarrior said in German deserves K changes, good or bad. I am a product of US public education in the 80's, so naturally I only speak one language (and even that could be debated!), therefore almost all written German looks like cussing to me unless it has a smiley at the end of the sentence.... ;D You know you got scrogged1 in school when a lot of the people who apologize for their English have better grammar skills with their second or third language than you do with your only language. ;) Best Smash 1Scrogg Pronunciation (skraw-g) v. scrogged, scrogg-ing v.tr. 1. Slang: To take advantage of; cheat: "I got scrogged." 2. Vulgar Slang: To have sexual intercourse with. 3. See also:Centsible

Geez i'm an idiot, too many short bus moments for me lately....palm guru says get wap instead of imode page and smilies come back, he's right! :D Anyway...... How much of an issue is temp. co. on the resistor ladder DAC? The reason I ask is my in progress layout for the AOUTLC has the resistor "farm" spread out and spaced so DIP resistor networks can be loaded instead of individual resistors.....will this cause accuracy issues vs. loaded with discrete resistors? Best Regards Smash PS: thanks for the private teasing about my "mastery" of the net, very funny stuff! ;)

Holy crap.... Sorry guys! I just realized that when I read this thread the first time, I did not see any of the smilies in any of the posts that were heated....My bad! It reads totally different without them. When TK did the forum upgrade a few days ago it started serving a WAP http://www.answers.com/topic/wap version of the forum, and I have been reading via my Palm E2. On my browser, on the Palm, none of the smilies are shown in the body of a message. If you read it without those it looks like you guys were getting a bit personal.... :D Looks quite fine with the smilies. ;) My apologies, I did not like browsing on that thing anyway, now I have a great reason not too.. ::) Best Smash

Whatever this little pissing match is about, I'll first ask politely for it to stop. How quickly can you ensure that TK won't want to release anything else related to CV? Keep this up if you want to find out. TK gets paid only in self-satisfaction for overcoming technical hurdles, a good feeling from helping strangers, and the general outpouring of thanks & goodwill from the community. Hijacking a release thread into a fight is not the way to say "thanks for your hard work". Not pointing fingers @ anyone, everyone who participates is to blame. I don't care who started it, who's daddy can beat up who's daddy, etc. Please prove to me that you guys are actually adults and can play friendly, so that I don't have to put on the admin hat and "re-phrase" my request to end this before it degrades the forum further. I really hope you guys spend more time playing with your gear than debating features, as this seems like a massive waste of tinker time. As usual I don't pretend to speak for TK or anyone else, these views are mine. Best SmashTV

The S&H chips would be way more expensive and tricky than multiple AOUT LCs. S&H chips seem to have a short product lifecycle so picking one that will be around this time next year is a challenge. My -in progress- layout for the AOUTLC board is fairly compact (too much so, I'm spacing it out better for a human to build) so if size is a consideration for you with the S&H we can work around it. A very good idea at that! Do you want help in the form of a custom board layout? Are you working on code for this yet? Let me know if/how I can help.....I'll have time after the new releases. Best Regards Smash

Hi S The SID board is testing now, the CORE and others are close to final, but I still have to wait out the Chinese holiday (fab is closed) and usual turnaround time before I will have them in hand. So hopefully that just means a couple of weeks. Testing the SID has been delayed, Everything works fine except for my only SID chip. :( I had planned to have these shipping already without the sold out period I'm in now....I pulled the remaing stock to re-ship all of my Dec 20th global shipments, since almost all of those have not made it to thier destinations. (If you are one of these guys, thanks for your patience, look for an email from me later today with refund/replacement options.) Best Regards Smash

So if your AC inlet is metal, isn't that carrying one leg of your low voltage AC to the chassis? (can't tell from the pics) Power down and do a continuity check between the case and both legs of your AC input, one at a time. That would be my first guess..... Metal power jacks should never be used with AC, due to these kinds of issues. With DC a metal jack is a bonus since it carries the ground effectively to the chassis.... No no don't just live with it! This is dangerous since some xformer designs can sink a lot of current.....Let's say your chassis is now connected to the hot leg side of the transformers output, and it comes into contact with anything on the neutral leg (most things in your house!), the potential -could- be full 110vAC depending on the transformer design. Seen this many many times with the coin op stuff, two games next to each other with one line cord flipped in relation to the other where they plug into the outlet. Both work fine, but as soon as a patron touches metal on both they get a full 110v shock. Keep in mind it takes more than 7vdc to meltdown a transformer...you might want to see how much AC voltage potential you have there.... We can get this through process of elimination, and I definitely would not run it until you have at least isolated the chassis. Next run might mean your SID chip not just another transformer.... :-\ Another thing that's not completely related, thought the MIDI is opto-isolated there is still a ground connection on the MIDI out, so an improperly wired MIDI cable (shield wired to ground) or non-standard MIDI ports on other gear can cause some real issues like wall wart supplies smoking (worst) and flaky MIDI data from ground loops (best). More info on the power connection please! :) Best Smash

New SID boards should be shipping in the next couple of weeks, due to the upcoming holiday I don't know exactly when. Hoping to see them before the fab shuts down for vacation. :) New CORE boards will be out soon after that, with revisions to most of the remaining boards following. The new rev will incorporate changes to the CORE->SID wiring (to reflect the MIOS 1.8 hardware change), SID clock fed by the CORE, pads for audio connectors on board, etc. More info as I make up the documentation..... I expected to have them out by now but real life, 2000+ spam per day mixed with my email, and recent illness has kept me from finishing the layouts. Good, Fast, Cheap. Pick two. ;) Best! SmashTV