Wilba

No. The only way you can truly test if the SID is working (i.e. all oscillators work and filter works) is to plug it into something that can send it digital signals and let you listen to the audio output, like a Commodore 64, HardSID or MIDIbox SID.

Ahh... yeah that would be it. Judging from part numbering of the resistor networks that SmashTV uses: http://au.mouser.com/catalog/636/619.pdf "A" means common bus, "B" means isolated. So in this case, it was probably three isolated resistors, instead of five connected to 5V. I think I better update the wiki to avoid this kind of mistake :P

Yep, resistor network in R39 not being correct will be the cause. FYI the left-most pin (closest to the label) is the common pin of the resistor network (but you already knew that I'm sure).

Weird... It could be that the sound card is outputting 5V on that pin if the MIDI Out, which is now connected to the 5V tracks of the MB-6582 PCB through a 220 Ohm resistor (as well as grounds being connected) and this is just enough to power the backlight a little, but not enough to boot the PIC. I probably would not worry about it, the fact that you have working MIDI In and MIDI Out means there's nothing wrong with your PCB. This sounds like the master PIC thinks buttons are being pressed and perhaps also that encoders are being turned. That could be missing pull-up resistors on the DIN inputs (i.e. R30-R39). If you haven't got a control surface connected via the pads at the bottom, then it should not do anything - i.e. the base PCB can work fine without a connected control surface, even with the DIN and DOUT chips installed (U16-U23).

If you can wait a few more weeks (months?) for Doug to get ready to make/sell cases, perhaps this one-PCB design will help you: http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,11802.0.html

Nice work! You have now joined a very small group of people who have manually wired an MB-6582 style switch/LED matrix. (From memory, I think it's only TK, MTE, subatomic and maybe SounDuke). It's this amount of manual wiring that inspired me to make the CS PCB, even though PCB designing probably took me ten times as long as manual wiring :) This will look pretty cool in retro beige... I like the darker beige of the original C64 actually... have a look how good it might look.

Things with semiconductors (diodes, transistors, voltage regulators, ICs) are most heat sensitive I think. Capacitors are fairly tolerant. Resistors are practically impossible to destroy with a soldering iron (most often they are just chunks of carbon). It's OK to have high temperatures for a short time... i.e. it's better to solder a joint quickly at a high temperature for just 3 seconds, than use a lower temperature for 10 or 20 seconds. With ptractice, you can solder a joint in 1-2 seconds, and if it needs a bit more solder, do another 1-2 seconds. For temperature sensitive things like transistors, it's a good idea to let the part cool after each solder joint. Don't worry about melting stuff other than the solder! You can't melt the PCB, the pads, or even the solder mask (the red coating on the PCB), and as I said before, it's better to have a good, high temperature and solder the joint quickly, than stuff around for several seconds trying to warm up the pad and lead enough to make the solder stick. Crank it up to 350° C and try a few resistor joints. Try also adding a tiny blob of solder to the end of the tip, then use this blob to get heat into the pad and lead. I mean TINY, not enough to make the whole joint, just enough to improve the heating of the pad and lead. Also (and sort of contradictory advice) try holding the iron at a shallow angle, like 20° from the PCB and use more of the side of the tip rather than just the end of the tip. Your aim in all this is to heat up the pad and lead at the same time to a hot enough temperature that solder you feed in just melts instantly, turns into a blob on the pad and then ultimately gets sucked into the hole.

A = anode = + K = cathode = - LCD backlights are typically just a bunch of parallel LEDs. Just like any diode, LEDs pass current in one direction, from the anode to the cathode (with exceptions, in which case it's considered reverse bias). If your LCD has "A" and "K" labels on pins 15 and 16, it's the same standard pinout: http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp/mbhp_lcd.pdf

You can take silence as "Wilba was working, asleep, or didn't see the new post" :) PSU Option B adds the 9V DC (from the C64 PSU's separate 9V AC) on top of the regulated 5V DC from the C64 PSU. Thus you were measuring ~18V relative to the 5V DC's ground. J25's only use is as a separate unregulated supply for powering a fan, if for example you didn't want to run it on the 9V or 12V (or 5V) rails which may introduce noise into the audio. That CAN happen, as I discovered, and ironically, it's the cheap black fan that happily runs slowly on 5V that makes no noise, and the more expensive, red LED fan that is both mechanically noisy and puts a whine in the audio too.

Orders for 6582A SID MEGASALE #7 were posted yesterday. 6582A SID MEGASALE #8 is in progress and taking orders until stock runs out: http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12747.0.html

It could be just the photo, but it looks a bit like your solder joints were done with a soldering iron that was not hot enough, or you're having trouble getting the solder to suck into the hole. It's a bit hard to describe really - if the iron isn't hot enough, then the solder tends to be non-sticky, like it's got a crusty coating... when it is hot enough, it's more liquid and flows more. Similarly, if a solder blob has lost it's rosin (flux) eg. if you are carrying a blob on the iron tip to the joint, then it won't stick. **edit** that was a really bad description of not-hot-enough-solder... think of it more like soft-serve icecream or whisked egg whites... it will be malleable and hold a shape and with the iron you can pull out "peaks" and "horns" from the joint, instead of it being liquid and pulling itself into a blob. Ideally you should be placing the tip so it touches both the pad and the lead, then applying solder into the joint (or even onto the tip) so it melts and gets sucked into the hole. You can see it happen suddenly, the blob on the joint gets progressively bigger as you feed more solder, then it gets sucked into the hole and forms like a tent around the lead. The joints I can see on the SID IC's socket look good - I'm only commenting on the ones in the audio buffer section (last pic) where there isn't a neat "tent" or "dome" rather it's more of a spiky blob. I would advise getting a solder sucker (solder pump) - the cheap one-shot-suck kind, not something with an actual motor-driven pump - and sucking out the solder from these joints and trying again. You can't really fix these joints by adding more solder until you've taken away some. You don't need to remove the parts, or get all the solder out, just make the joints "flat" again. (Find attached an atrocious Paint-annotated criticism of your solder joints. Sorry.) SID7_bottom_02.JPG SID7_bottom_02.JPG

This brings to mind that you can currently hold down Mute button and then multi-select tracks with the GP buttons. Can releasing the Mute button mute those selected tracks? (That's actually what I thought it should do when I first discovered it - I haven't read the manual much :) ). That seems a bit more intuitive than using another button, although at the cost of the selecting track function in the Mute page (maybe that function can be refactored into other V4 features/pages).

BTW good troubleshooting... if only everyone did these kinds of tests before asking for help! You could start by assuming the capacitors and resistors are "good", it's unlikely you could have damaged them from soldering or from too much voltage or current. Most likely it's the transistor that's blown, perhaps from overheating while soldering, although you can't rule out bad solder joints, broken tracks, transistor put in backwards, or even forgetting a jumper in J2_SID4. Consider also the capacitor C25_SID4 put in backwards. However, this brings to mind that you "mislaid" a transistor, and then found it again on a separate piece of cardboard. Are you sure this was not the BC337 which goes into T1 (near the header J15, for LED backlight brightness) and instead you've put a BC547 in there? I think a BC337 in the audio buffer would probably still work, but just check to be sure. Take a close-up photo of the audio sections of SID #7 and #8 (i.e. *_SID4)... maybe something will look amiss to me :)

18.5V seems a bit high... J25 is between the bridge rectifier/filter capacitor and the voltage regulator, so it's converted the 9V AC into DC but it's still unregulated and "lumpy". I can't easily check what it would be without load, although I've just started populating another MB-6582 base PCB so I'll have to check while I build it. It would be good to know, if you are definitely checking voltage difference between the two pins of J25, and what PSU Option you are using.

You'll notice you only see one line on your display, because the setup_mb6582.hex expects a 4x20 character LCD. You can change setup_mb6582.asm and recompile (make a new setup_mb6582.hex). You want to change it to #define DEFAULT_LCD_LINES 2 Can you go into more detail about how you troubleshooted this? Break it down into specific tests... eg. testtone app, SIDs in sockets, #8 pass, #7 fail - testtone app, SIDs not in sockets, etc. It sounds like you proved the audio buffer for #7 is working and that it's just a SID in socket #7 that doesn't output sound through that audio buffer.

I think toneburst is only using a 2x20 for testing. You can use any size LCD for MB-SID that is 2x20 or bigger (4x20, 2x40). You only need to change some settings in the .asm file and recompile (not really "programming"). Those pots can go anywhere - Each pot has six wires that connect to headers above the SIDs. There is no actual programming involved. If you're able to edit a forum post and quote me multiple times, you have enough skill to edit the .asm file to reconfigure the firmware to your specific needs. :)

The idea of the expansion port (on my MB-6582 case) was to wire it to the COREx_J6 headers, i.e. to connect to an external box with AOUT and filter modules inside. So inside the case, I'd use connectors and ribbon cables and just solder wires to the DB25 connector on the panel. Since the original prototype, seppoman designed the AOUT_NG and stereo SSM2044 filter PCBs, so it's now really easy to add external filters to the MB-6582 base PCB - just connect them via the COREx_J6 headers. COREx_J6 and COREx_J7 are paired into a 2x5 pin dual header (identical to J6/J7 on MBHP_CORE_V3), so you can use a standard 10-pin IDC connector and ribbon cable. Similarly, J5_CORE1 can be used to connect analog input sources like pots (identical to J5 on MBHP_CORE_V3). You'll need to read the MB-SID documentation and recompile the firmware to enable this. I believe this allows you to control the user-customized Knobs layer, so maybe only 5 analog inputs are available.

from http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/wilba_mb_6582 from http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=wilba_mb_6582_base_pcb_construction_guide For what it's worth, CSG 8580R5 are identical to the CSG 6582A I sell. It's possible MOS 8580R5 might sound slightly different to the CSG 6582A I sell, but highly unlikely. I say this because some SID fans think they can hear a difference between CSG 8580R5 and the older MOS 8580R5. I am skeptical though. Some people think they can hear a difference when using gold-plated phono jacks. :P

If you ultimately want 8 SIDs, it is actually easier and less chance of error to use the MB-6582 base PCB, since all the wiring between modules are done on the PCB, you do not need to make PSU and bankstick boards (i.e. convert schematic to veroboard), and there are a lot of other people who have build this PCB to help solve any problems. In contrast, if you do it with modules, there is more chance of making a mistake somewhere and much harder for people to help you fix it. I'm not trying to say that the MB-6582 PCB is the only way to build MB-SID, it's just one way, but I disagree with newbies thinking it's too hard and that modules are easier. The size and complexity of the board doesn't make it any harder to solder, it just takes more time to solder than one Core and one SID module. You can solder it in stages also... get the PSU section working first, then get one Core working with LCD, then get one SID module working. When you have gained experience with that, you can finish the other Core and SID modules, so even easier than using separate module PCBs, since there was no wiring and no PSU board to make. As for rack mount - other people have adapted the common switch/LED matrix of the MB-6582 control surface to their own control surface design. Once you have designed a control surface, you can build this on veroboard. Switches and LEDs do not have to be in the same positions in the matrix as the MB-6582 control surface - you can move things around to make wiring easier, and then change the firmware to match.

Looking good! Don't forget to add more banksticks for storing ensembles and more patch banks!

Oww! My Ears! Why does every song sound like it's the demo song from a mid-90's Casio toy keyboard?

zzz

Very cool. If I ever did a green/black one, I was planning to tint some white Waldorf knobs, making the white parts green, and so making it a green/black version of the last one (the red/black TK special). So it's very cool to see someone else doing it, and how good it looks. Congratulations! SS: I don't know how many are alive. I think people finish them and have too much fun with it to post pictures or email me... I don't blame them, MB-SID V2 is very addictive.

It's better to be 0.5mm smaller than the hole than 0.5mm bigger. FPE do great work but you can't expect to use the same dimension and not have it "rub" as it goes in... this scratches the cut edge of the acrylic and it looks bad.