emerson

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.

Well, the nice thing is that Muse have come up with it -- at the very least, the core Linux part of the software is required by the GPL to be made available as source code to their customers, who can then do whatever they want (within limits of GPL) with it. So it's totally reasonable for someone to throw together a community site to share DIY plans for Receptor-based boxes if there's a customer who'd care to get and redistribute the source code. (Though I don't see a download-source link on their site, hmmn...)

(*gentle, admiring, respectful poke*) ?

Oh, excellent, looks like he's doing -exactly- what I'm on about. Thanks tons for the pointer; I'll be back in lurk mode now for a while as I get together more bits and things, but I'm sure I'll pop back up with some MIOS questions in a few weeks. Thanks tons! (*wave)

I'm getting ready to dabble in all of this wonderful hardware hacking after reading and reading for the past several weeks. I'm going to be getting my feet wet with just slapping together the JDM programmer and a core module, probably will build a MIDImon so that I can actually see something happening. But I have several custom projects in mind, and I'm wanting to solicit feedback on how best to go about doing this; I'm sure it's going to take some PIC programming, which doesn't scare me, but I'm wanting to get some direction first. The first and most important project is that I want to put together a device that does the work of manging setlists for us. Specifially, I'm wanting it to have memorized a set of patch changes (and associated MIDI channels for bonus points) in a certain order, and have buttons / footswitches / analog ins of some sort for increment / decrement. That is, I tell it that the "setlist" goes: program 32, channel 2; program 10, channel 1; program 2, channel 2... And the increment and decrement switches will walk up and down that list as needed. Sense? I'm visualizing putting this into a one rackspace box with an LED display (like the MMC display) showing me the current 'step,' channel, and program number. The programming UI would consist of a simple up/down pair of buttons for each of those, so that I go to step 3, for instance, and use the up/down buttons near the channel and program display to set up what that step does. And maybe a 'save' button to write it off to a bankstick. Does all that make sense? I'm thinking I'd need a core module, a DIN module, some variation of the MMC LED output thingie from the MIDImon, a bankstick or two, and not much else apart from some custom PIC code. Is this something I should do with the old world stuff, or should I start examining MIOS for this kind of thing? Thanks in advance for any pointers you can give.