emerson

Almost there (stay on target).

Following the MB6582 Control Surface Construction Guide, I'm nearly to the point of soldering the pins for the encoders. The guide then offers the advice "Test LEDs now if you wish" and references J2 (the one near the power supply on the main PCB, I guess?) but I'm not sure what specific action is meant by that. How would this notional LED test work? Thanks in advance. (Edit: for posterity, I now realize it's talking specifically about the optional LEDs for illuminated knobs.)

Phase II proceeds smoothly....

I got hold of one of those aluminum-case probably-bootleg sammichFM and have been playing with it for a couple weeks. It wasn't in the best shape and I've fixed up a couple small issues already. I noticed a weird behavior that I'm sure is totally obvious to someone smarter than me: notes will crackle and be distorted a bit out one stereo channel, then out the other, in groups of three. That is, if I play three notes in a row, they'll all be distorted on the left, then the next three I play will be distorted on the right. Also, if I play a three-note chord over and over, that counts as the three notes, and the distortion will jump from channel to channel with each chord. My suspicions contain thoughts about polyphony and voices per channel and so forth, but I'm already in over my head. I imagine one of the OPL DACs and/or one of the op-amps is needing to be replaced but I have no idea how to track that down without just starting to desolder SMDs off of the board which ouch. Anyone have any guidance about how next to debug this? I've attached an MP3 of playing notes and chords; the stereo distortion-swapping effect is probably best heard through headphones. Thanks! three note distortion.mp3

Well, I let it sit for a couple weeks and came back to it yesterday. I've reflowed every solder connection (apart from the PIC itself), tested continuity all over the place, reflashed the TIA app a couple times, replaced the banksticks, and tried both MIOS Studio and the Max Manager to contact it while it's doing whatever it's doing. When powered up, it blinks MIDI In and Out, then MIDI In comes on and the volume LEDs do the pattern that means bankstick init. And there it stays, no matter how long I wait. I've started to suspect that maybe the PIC itself is bad, or has a badly soldered pin maybe. I got it preinstalled on the board from Modular Addict, so I haven't wanted to dig in there myself, especially since my SMD soldering skills are not great. There's nothing obviously visibly wrong with its pins, so I feel like I'm starting to grasp at straws. Anyone have thoughts on further debugging what the PIC thinks it's doing while it gets stuck in the "initialize bankstick" phase?

Second status report: of the nine SIDs I'd salvaged from C64s through the years, seven boot up and make noise, two 8580s and five 6581s. I guess I'll need to get a SwinSID or something to fill this out, but that's actually a better ratio than I expected, so again I am delighted.

I intend to build the control surface, too, and have gathered the case and most of the rest of the needed stuff, but this has been a slow burner so no telling when it'll be done.

Very pleased to report that my 6582 has made its first noise -- notes played on the MIOS Studio keyboard trigger the one (so far) 8580 to play that lovely reedy default patch. This is delightful. Thanks for all your help so far, all y'all.

Aha that's good info. I let it run for a while, like 20min, and it kept going, so I'm having the hypothesis that my banksticks are at fault. Knowing it's supposed to do that LED pattern, though, is heartening, we're getting somewhere at all finally. I tried that other firmware without any change. So to be clear, the one issue is that with one MIDI interface, it leaves the MIDI In LED on constantly. With another, it doesn't. Neither seem to respond to note-on or the like. I'll also try the Max manager. So far I've tried just the virtual keyboard that's part of MIOS Studio, without luck -- no MIDI LEDs lighting, no notes out, so I think it's just stuck in that initialize state and not fully starting. (Edit: Yeah the Max manager won't even connect.) So, later I'm going to desolder the banksticks and try re-adding a fresh pair I have sitting around. I remember I had trouble with the SMD soldering on this pair so I might have damaged them or have shorts hidden underneath them or something. (Edit: fresh pair of banksticks had no effect, still stuck in the bankstick init LED loop. Gonna keep looking around there. Early testing shows that exactly the correct pins of the banksticks are connected to ground, still gonna work on testing others' connectivity to the right places.)

This is the third re-edit of this post because the bootloader and MIOS and setup_tia_cartridge.hex have *finally* all been successfully loaded (I reflowed a couple sketchy-looking solder joints, reseated the optocoupler a couple times, suddenly all is well with MIOS Studio). So we're back to the initial problem, though with a new twist. The MIDI In LED is staying on constantly, and now the "level" LEDs are lighting up in pairs, descending from the red ones to the bottom green ones (video below). Further edit: Actually hooked the box's audio up to see whether it's working despite no MIDI indicators. It's not, but it is creating a -hellacious- burst of Atari-noise at the end of every LED cycle. Also, weirdly, out here in the studio room, the MIDI In LED isn't lit. Forum server didn't like the size of the photos, so: https://hayseed.net/~emerson/TIA/ ...has pretty good pix of the front and back, as well as a short video of the new LED behavior with the sound burst audible, though turned way down.

OK good, I'll leave it alone. After a couple of false starts, I got my PICkit clone's six pins connected to the jumpers as per the illustration. I fired up MPLAB X IPE, selected device PIC18F4685, told it to power the PIC via the PICkit, connected successfully to the PIC, and selected bootloader_v1_2b_pic18f4685.hex from the mios_v19_h.zip archive from ucapps.de/mios_download.html. It programmed just fine, said it succeeded with no errors. My intent then was to get it talking to MIOS Studio to verify it was working, then upload MIOS itself and then finally the TIA app. But now, it's not even spitting out the little sysex handshake blob that the bootloader normally sends at power-up time, and that it had been doing up until I started messing with MPLAB. "Query" doesn't work at all, which I guess is to be expected. Oh yes, I'd forgotten the jumper at first but did catch that error pretty early and put it back into the right place, with no luck. I also did a second pass of connecting it to the PICkit, running MPLAB, and programming the bootloader hex file, which also alleged to complete successfully. I'm gonna sleep on this and see if I find success tomorrow. Thanks for walking through this with me so far.

The green and white ones are correct, both pairs, and my meter tells me that the DIN pins and the DB25 pins for those are connected as you say. Weirdly, DIN pin2 isn't grounded, even though the third wire from the MIDI Out cable goes to that pin. I guess it didn't connect well when they made it, and I'm gonna have to take the connector apart more to debug that. Hmm I used my PICkit clone to reprogram the bootloader into the PIC, and MPLAB reported success. Now, though, when I put power to it while connected to MIOS Studio, it doesn't even give off the initial "f0 00 00 7e 40 00 01 f7" that it did previously. I re-tried flashing the bootloader with MPLAB, and again it reported success, so the PIC is alive, at least, just not... doing anything. That doesn't work, and didn't work previously before I started tinkering with MPLAB -- it just gave the normal "No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core!" etc etc error.

Am I right in seeing that the center pin of the MIDI Out DIN should be attached to pin 15 / ground of the DB25? That one is not, I'll look to fix it. The other four from the two MIDI DINs are correctly connected (ie, MIDI In seems to be hooked up correctly, unless it relies on the pin 15 / ground from the MIDI Out DIN). (Edit: Or is this the thing I vaguely remember where you ground the MIDI cable shield but don't attach it to one of the pins?) MIDI In isn't working, and I don't have a PIC burner for surface-mount PICs, so... not yet. Am I correct in thinking that the MIDI light staying on is possibly destructive and I shouldn't keep it powered up that way? Thanks!

I've made it to the "power it up and see" phase of building the cartridge TIA box. When I do apply power, the LEDs for MIDI In and Out blink briefly, which feels like a booting-up indicator, and then the MIDI In light turns on and stays on. That seems like a bad symptom so I pull power immediately. I've tried reflowing some of the solder joints around the optocoupler's cluster of components and the DIN pins for MI+ MI-, also looking for solder bridges etc, but no luck so far. FWIW, MIDI Out is working as expected -- when I power it up connected to MIOS Studio, it sends the "f0 00 00 7e 40 00 01 f7" as expected. It's just the MIDI input on the cartridge that seems bad. Any hints on where to look next for this? I'm bumping up against my late-beginner limits. Thanks in advance.

Awesome, thanks. I'll see if I can suss out a way to add text while not making the top unprintable.

Yeah, I've been on-again-off-again on doing this for... many years. Which is why I have a stack of the ancient 16-class PICs sitting around, I think I was first angling toward this in the SIDv1 days. I got the boards and the parts kit from SmashTV quite a while ago and then they promptly went into a drawer and then a moving box. Been opening a lot of boxes during the plague year, though, so it finally resurfaced. :)

Oh this just isn't going to work -- having the raised lettering means you can't print lying on the front face, which means you need supports *everywhere* for the sides. I've attached my first-stab STL (not in love with where some of the text landed, meh), but I think this idea might be a non-starter, at least with my printer. fm box with text.stl

Tinkering with this idea of adding raised text, and using Blender with some initial success. Haven't tried to turn it back into an STL yet. Anyone have a nice clean SVG copy of the sammichFM logo? Also, yeah, the original FreeCAD files would probably work better than trying to start with an STL, if you still have them around.

Got the whole thing soldered up (sorta ignoring the advice to do one section at a time) power supply option E continuity-tested all the indicated places made my wallwart <-> 7-pin adapter powered the board voltage tested all the indicated places, all golden first try. Then as the cherry on top, stuck the opto chip and one of my sacrificial ancient PICs into it, and MIOS Studio popped right up with "Bootloader is up and running". So yeah, feeling pretty good about my progress. And thanks to all of you for the immense bulk of documentation and advice that got me here.

Getting my 6582 to the point where it's time to think about stuffing chips in it, I've discovered that the big stash of PICs I remembered having, for all these years, are all 16F or the teeny 18F flavors, probably from the SIDv1 days. So, is Modular Addict the go-to place to get pre-bootstrapped PICs these days? Their site's been "under maintenance" for several days so I'm casting about to see if there are alternatives. Thanks!

Edit: Yeah I was just underpowering it. Swapped to a burlier wallwart and everything is acting as expected. Thanks for the "PSU being overloaded" pointer, that totally put me on the right path. For posterity: So in the intervening time, it started working again, then stopped again, so yes it's something weird and intermittent. I did get it as far as getting a test tone out of the SID module, so there's progress, even though still a mystery. WRT other questions: -- I'm driving the CORE with a generic 9v/200mA wallwart (is 200mA enough for just the CORE idling on its own? Starting to think not.) -- Yeah, the CORE's regulator can get pretty hot after a couple minutes. -- Windows 10 x64, MIOS Studio 2.4.9 -- PIC is from a SmashTV parts order years and years ago where MIOS was preinstalled. It seems to have bootloader 1.2 and MIOS 1.8. I see that MIOS has moved along so I may try to bump it to current. -- The PIC is firmly seated in the socket, but cold solder joints are certainly a possibility. I'll go over the back of the board and look for that. Thanks for the feedback -- was sorta hoping there might be "oh yeah that's known problem X, and here's the easy fix" but that might have been a wee bit naively optimistic. So, thinking my 9v/200mA adapter may be too anemic, going to swap in a 9v/1A one I just found.

Recently got a bunch of stuff out of storage, including all my progress from a few years ago on a simple MIDIbox SID. I'd gotten as far as a CORE module and a SID module, successfully powered up and connected, and playing the test tone. So, I was slowly trying to get back to that state, one little bit at a time. I got my CORE module connected to MIDI, and powered it up, and MIOS Studio reached out and shook hands and everything was fine, all the way to "Application up and running!" I put it aside for a few minutes, then when I came back to it, it wasn't shaking hands any more. When powered up, it spits out a correct-looking: [64989.590] f0 00 00 7e 40 01 01 f7 But then when MIOS Studio sends the big sysex blast to try to make contact, nothing comes back. (Device ID is set to 1.) No response from MIOS8 or MIOS32 core! Check MIDI IN/OUT connections and Device ID! For debugging see also Help->MIDI Troubleshooting So, MIDI -was- working in both directions, the handshake was working, and suddenly the module won't answer. I changed exactly nothing between those two outcomes except, like, moving the module around on my desk. I feel like it's not -broken- since it fires up and sends its greeting, but I have no idea what might have happened to make it act like this. I did go through the pertinent steps of the MIDI Interface Troubleshooting page, looping back MIDI, jumpering TX and RX with the PIC out, testing voltages and grounds, and everything acts as expected. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance, I'ma keep tinkering with this.

Did you ever get this all the way to FPD? I'm all thumbs with CAD tinkering, so if you did, and could share it, you'd be my hero. :) Thanks.

Ha! That's exactly it. I figured it might be something dumb on my part, but I wasn't looking THAT dumb yet. It hadn't occured to me that the ICs might face different directions, all notches point north, right? Thanks for the quick (and correct!) reply, off i go to see if I can get noise out of this thing tonight. As usual, you guys kick ass.

Howdy all! After having been away from them for a couple years (long story), I sat down again with my kits to try to get a simple Core <-> SID making noise. I'd bought the Smash kits for these two modules and managed to get them about 80% done then had to step away for a while. So I've been poking at them again the past several days, and I'm astonished to discover that I have managed to make it all work... almost. I have the core acting as expected; it was one of the pre-burned MIOS PICs from the smash kits, so when I put power to it, it cheerily pops out the one little Sysex message. And I've built the SID module, and wired them together with the single ribbon cable, (9v for the SID itself comes next), and per instructions, I go to check the IC voltage for the three sockets. And what i get is: IC1 25 -> 14: 5.2V IC2 8 -> 16: -5.2V (negative, inverted) IC3 8 -> 26: 5.2V I've squinted at the schematics but I'm far too much of a newb to see what i could have done wrong to get just one of them inverted. Have I missed some important piece of information during my long absence? I have a vague uneasy feeling that I'm looking at instructions that are newer than the kits I have -- my PCBs allege to be CORE_R4D and SID_R3A... should I be checking with one of the "omg this is so deprecated but we keep it around for clueless slowpokes' sets of instructions? Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.