stryd_one

I used to do that. You can buy rolls of little coloured 'dot' stickers in many different colours, theyre not too pricey, and certainly better than blowing things up :D They're also just big enough to write numbers on them which can also be handy. This idea has recently been adopted by Intel who's motherboards started to have colour coded plugs for keyboards and mice and video etc. Actually it's not so recent now I guess... I think I'm showing my age here hehehehe. DEC were first to do it I think, or perhaps it was compaq? Anyway they're both hp now! My studio takes about 6 hours to unplug all cables and 12 to plug them all in... It's easy to get confused with that many wires.... Problem is, wrapping labels around the wires leaves you with yucky sticky goo all over them as they age.... Personally I think that the best thing is to use a paint marker (for those in AU, Artline XF series "outdoor" markers are the ones). You don't get sticky residue, and you don't have to follow a colourcoded plugpack's wires all the way up the cable (which is often in knots) to the colourcoded plug on the device. Hope this helps

I accidentally looked into a laser diode for a 2000 metre fibre optic link a week or two ago... only looked at it for a few hundred milliseconds and had a big green spot in my vision for the whole day :-\ I talked to the tech and he reckons that any light that is bright enough can burn your eyes so long as you look at it long enough (duh)... How long you have to look to do damage depends on the light. Keep in mind that UV light is what gives you sunburn, so I'm sure it's capable of doing damage. It might be nice and trendy to have pretty UV LEDs but I think it's a bad idea to be honest. Just use red, theyre cheaper :) While I was typing this I thought to myself "OK this is all good in theory, how about you go google it and see if your theory that it is dangerous is substanciated" [move][glow=red,2,300]!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DON'T USE UV LED'S !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DON'T USE UV LED'S !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!![/glow][/move] After reading the following links I would HIGHLY recommend removing the UV LED's and replacing them. It may be a costly mistake but its better than winding up blind!!!!!!!! Read up, and learn: http://ledmuseum.home.att.net/leduv.htm http://www.labour.gov.sk.ca/safety/radiation/ultraviolet/health-effects.htm http://wolfstone.halloweenhost.com/TechBase/bltled_BlacklightLED.html http://www.blue-room.org.uk/lofiversion/index.php/t4624.html Some random quotes that are given to avoid lawsuits: NOTE: SHORT WAVE ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT CAN CAUSE BLINDNESS OR SEVERE EYE DAMAGE. NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT SHORT WAVE UV LIGHT! Please Note that these lights ARE NOT TOYS! UV Lights during operation radiate intense UV light Do not look directly into the UV light during operation of the device. This can be harmful to the eyes even for brief period due to intense UV light. If viewing the UV light is necessary, use UV filtered glasses to avoid eye damage. Be aware that the visible light emitted when in operation, is less than 1% of the UV light being radiated. Most of the light generated by the device is invisible to the human eye but can easily cause damage to the eye. CAUTION: Intense UV light can cause eye damage if viewed directly. Keep away from children. In addition, some LEDs are very bright. Visible light LEDs are unlikely to cause eye damage, because people tend to shield themselves from painfully bright light. But black light LEDs are both powerful and nearly invisible; people might might have a spotlight aiming at them and not know it. blah bla ramble ramble..... Basically from all the pages I've read (including but not limited to those above), it does depend on the wavelength of your particular model of LED as to _what_ they damage, as opposed to _whether_ they damage... Lower wavelengths burn the back of your eye, higher wavelengths burn the lens. I think that it is important to learn two things here. Firstly, UV LED's are bad f*cking news for your eyes. Secondly, just because everyone else is doing it and it is really trendy and "cool", doesn't make it a good idea. This applies to everything in life. Humans are more like sheep than sheep sometimes....... Let's face it, there's very little practical value of using UV LED's over red, so what other reason would there be? Fashion. I say go buy some Versace jeans and be done with it ;D PS No offense intended here, I wanted purple/blue LEDs for my seq too..... Now I know better.

Thanks for the advice man :) I have just discovered that hp make scopes... I work for hp ;D I'll see if I can get some cheap gear for us! PS Sorry for the misunderstanding before

Badass! Thanks Duggle :D

Hey all, I think it's time I upgraded from my cruddy old $20 soldering iron and got a few other bits for the new lab.... I want to get a nice digital temperature controlled soldering station, an oscilloscope and a good multimeter. I don't necessarily need an $800 Weller station (would be nice tho!), but I do want to go for something a bit better than the standard stuff... But the trick is, I don't want to pay full retail prices. Anyone know of a good cheap source for these kind of tools? Multimeters seem to be easy to come by on ebay, and oscilloscopes are there but still pretty expensive.. I that's to be expected for a scope.. But soldering stations don't exactly feature prominently. There are some no-name brand things there which seem to have all the right features, but I gather that they're not all they're cracked up to be. Any advice? While I'm at it I think I'll get some clamps and solder suckers and dremel style drills and all that kind of stuff. I want to get into DIY a lot more now, so I want to have lots of tools for the job. Any suggestions for other tools and accessories for a high-end hobby/semi-pro setup? Thanks again all!

Electronics Disposal stores? Surplus stores? Crikey where are you guys?... I'm about to have to pay $30 for a 9VDC AC Adapter :( I wish we had stuff like that in Australia!

Mine is a CT2770, I'll let you all know whether it has the chips. Perhaps we could compile a list of which cards definitely do and do not have the chips, with details of the card, such as the CTxxxx numbers? Everyione, please post any info you have in here :)

Damn, I think I just bought a newer one!! The ebay listing said "sound blaster:, not "sounds blaster pnp"... Maybe I won't pay after all!

It seems to me that twice the price for 4 times the RAM is a good deal... I think we should aim to support 512kx8 chips, and then everything smaller will be backwards compatible with minor software changes. You're right about the latching. I hadn't considered that the individual pins will need to be set with a BSF rather than a MOVWF to the whole PORT (either operation takes the same amount of cycles), and when this is taken into consideration, if setting a number of pins, having the latch will not make a major performance drop... However when doing burst transfers, we may only want to change the value of one of the address pins, and so then it would be faster to avoid the latch... For example if only one pin from J10 is used, then that pin could be assigned to the last address bit, and then changing the last bit would be very fast (for reading the next byte from RAM).. Then the two address lines from J7 could be the 2nd and 3rd last address bits, and the three pins combined would allow for fast burst transfers up to 8 bytes. Please correct me if I've missed something. The J5, J7 and J10 pins should still work OK in conjunction with the SRAM for most applications, as passing data to the modules connected to those pins would need to be enabled by the module's own write enable bits. That is just a matter of making sure that the WE for the SRAM does not use the same pins as the WE for the other modules such as the MBFM or MBSID, for example.

Thanks for the local knowledge StevenC :) You're not in Melbourne by any chance?

Okay obviously I'm not the only crazy guy here ;D Smash's point has just been very clearly made in another thread... Despite all intentions of humour, obviously on a board where English is not the only language used, and not always the 1st language of the poster, sarcasm is NOT a good idea around here, so I will attempt to refrain. For your own sake, I would advise for you to do the same cheater, before communications breakdowns cause more unneccesary arguments. But you're more than welcome to be as sarcastic as you want if you PM me :)

I just came across this link: http://www.infinityelectronics.com/crossref.htm#sram thought it might be handy

How's this: http://www.futurlec.com/Memory/684000pr.shtml I looked on farnell and some of the chips of this size were about $80-100 !!! I'm sure I'm missing something as usual. Todd the hardware dummie ::)

I think maybe the humourous tone in cheater's post was lost... Or maybe I'm just a little too light-hearted and he was really being malicious... But I think for the sake of friendly conversation I will assume he was being funny.... WEREN'T YOU CHEATER!!! WEREN'T YOU!!!!!!!!! [move]twisting your arm[/move] ;D hehehe hey cheater next time use one of these:Â ;)Â ;D Smash, I reckon you're right on the money. Availability/performance/price. Now I will openly admit that I have no clue on how to find these things, aside from searchin on ebay :) (PS no hits at all on any of the SRAM types, darn.) I'll let the pro's make the call as to which chip is the one to go for. Obviously the bigger the better. Also, thanks for taking on the work of PCB design smash. There is absolutely no rush and no pressure, do this in your own time. We are lucky to have you show such generosity at all, and I'm sure noone will rush you. WILL YOU? WILLL YOOOOU!!!??? ;D heheheheheheh todd...who just can't seem to act serious!

I just took delivery of an elevata and the rackattack is on a ship on it's way to me now .... mmmm but they pale in comparison.... My G2 engine is on order :) Can't wait! But I digress! If you want to help me (lots, because I'm rather busy with my seq), I would definitely get involved in writing code to control drum synths....

Glad I could help :) The day it disappears I'm sure I will :'( !

rasOfir : You're a DJ aren't you?

Cheater: ehehehe you obviously see my point ;) Guys, although I want to make this solution flexible for the needs of all people, I do wonder if it is worth all this effort and performance drops. I'm sure TK would have liked to have a 68000 core module or an atmel core module, and although there are strong arguments for it, the PIC does the job and so there's not really a need for it. If we can make a 512x8 or 256x8 SRAM work, why do we need to support a smaller chip? The price difference seems to be only a few dollars at most, the equivalent of a single knob for a pot.. If you only need 128k, then just don't use the rest :) TL, thanks for doing this for us. I would really like to keep the latches down to 1, so as to enable burst transfers as discussed earlier - Perhaps you could use the same schematic as your earlier model of TK's idea, and use J10 for the extra address pins to support 512x8? Does your new schematic encompass smash's idea of having this be a plug-in board?

Oh I agree, but I just don't know if it's worth the effort... Maybe I'm just lazy ;) I'd rather invest the effort in including one more address line and just using the larger sram... Easier, and far greater benefit...

I've created a monster! :o It's alive! ALIIIIVE!! Heheheh *tightens the bolts in his neck* As for the chips availability, I must admit it's surprising to hear the middle range chip is only available in low voltages, but that's not really important, we can just ignore that model if we are going to make this thing work with different chips... Making it work with different voltages is not something I'm really interested in. Too hard basket! ;) TK, thanks so much for the schematic of the battery backup, as was said, that is hard to come by. Thanks for sharing yet another little gem with us. :) I'm not sure as to the benefits or drawbacks of SMD chips... anyone? Smash, I REALLY like the idea you have for the implementation of the daughterboard! Another advantage which you didn't mention is that by doing it in this way, we can in theory also make any and all of the pins on the PIC available for driving the SRAM. This has the advantage of making it far easier to support different types and sizes of chip, in combination with 1,2 or 3 latches to allow I/O with the core module Of course, if it is done in this way, it means that the latches will "switch" between working with the SRAM, and working with the interfaces on the core modules (AIN/OUT, DIN/OUT , LCD etc). This means that we would have to make some choices about performance. The whole thing becomes a matter of a performance and flexibility trade-off... The more SRAM chips we would like to support, the more pins from the core need to be dedicated to the SRAM, the more latches need to be used, which results in slower access to the SRAM and to the core's I/O to other modules... This is a difficult one... Where do we draw the line? Is it worth supporting many different SRAM types, if the core becomes so bogged down driving them that it becomes less useful for driving the core I/O?

You actually *want* RCA's? :o Yuck! (where's the emoticon of the smiley face throwing up?) :P

Well just the apps crash, and writing stuff for MIDI generally means using something like Jack for example,and tk or some other thing for the gui,etc etc... Which means dealing with far more features than the minimum necessary for the job, and an unfinished application. Hardware drivers etc also cause problems... As they are mostly made not by the hardware devs but by individuals who dev'd something that the hardware manufaturers never really intended.... Of course, you can start writing your own stuff but it really means a massive job and basically reinventing the wheel. The whole reason I don't want to use one of the admittedly excellent packages available (Oh my gosh, numerology is so cool, and I love sonar) is because of the lack of stability in winblows/wackOS... So why start developing the sequencer on a platform that lacks stability itself, when I can develop the same functionality based on MBHP/MIOS - I could be wrong about this, but I don't think I've ever seen a post on this forum where the MBHP platform has crashed without the reason being found and fixed - and most often it is due to some kind of user error. PC based OS's often crash and leave you with nothing but a silent mystery. (not cool during a live PA!) I don't know, in general, due to the nature of the beast, linux just seems to be one great big works in progress... Maybe in 5 or 10 years it will be a little closer to being a finished product... Also, I came across a great many apps which looked fantastic, but were only 3 /4 finished... Sometimes they were just abandonded, sometimes the developer decided to start work on a new project... It doesn't exactly instill a feeling of confidence when you start using application version 0.whatever... Using embedded linux on specialised hardware seems to have similar issues, as once again there are far more features available in the kernel than the bare necessities for the job. The move away from simplicity seems to be a move towards problems. Like I often say in my IT work, more features = more things to go wrong. But if you feel like designing a new specialised hardware platform and the software to run on it which is as far advanced as MIOS already is, count me in for dev'ing a sequencer for it! :D

I'd like to know about how this works in Australia too... Anyone? I know that there's supposed to be some sort of charges for synthesizers that come into the country but I don't know about that because I've bought a few synths from overseas on ebay and never had any charges? I have no idea....

If you wanted to be totally ultra cool you could take some circuits like these, and maybe you could find some more complex ones on synthDIY, and combine them with the MBHP platform to make a MIDIBox Drum synth :D

Works fine for me. Try clearing your temporary internet files and history, restart your computer, and try it again. If it doesn't work, try calling a friend with internet to test it for you, or your ISP. Good luck!