MRE

Assuming people will generally order in twos.. is $15 each (american) a decent deal?

Yeah.. somehow I doubt they would know a "radio" if it hit them in the face. CellphoneShack IS much more fitting.

my all time favorite story: about 1995 they went through a short period of trying to phase out small parts, and so they hid everything, and stopped ordering a lot of stuff.. untill they realized that was a bad idea. In the meantime they were trying to push every high dollar item on the shelves. me - walks into a ratshack, look around for the small components section, and cant find it because it is all hidden behind those sliding shelves they like to use.. I mumble something about how useless the place can be.. salesnoob - "Hey bro, can I help you with something?" me - "Yeah.. Im looking for Infrared LEDs.. whered you hide them this time?!" salesnoob - "uhh.. L e... D.. umm.." me - "You dont know what an LED is?!" me - "ya know.. its those little red lights.. I need an infrared one.. you cant see it.. its clear.. mumble mumble.." salesnoob - "uhh.. I dont think we have those.. . anymore.. " me - "useless.. mumble mumble.. FINE! THANKS! mumble" salesnoob - "Hey! you interested in a cell phone?" me - "Why the F^*$ would I come in here for a 30 cent part and walk out with a cell phone?!" That was my first official curse in public by the way.

p.s. I move November 6th.. so.. I wont ship anything past mid October. I hardly never use paypal, so I have no choice but to accept personal checks.

Well, I am about to move to Japan, so any deal that can be worked out in the next few weeks would be fine. Make any reasonable offer plus shipping and I'll send them out. I would hesitate to only send one. so.. How about Twos and fours? They are all in fantastic shape, and I will send a cable with each one. I dont see a problem with shipping overseas except for the time involved. I can also make an attempt to check each one before shipping. By the way, being that they are VFDs.. they suck a lot of current. I have never tried running 4 off a an '05 regulator. Private message if you want some?

I still have a load of 20X2 noritaki VFDs.. nice pretty blue. If anyone is interested, make an offer. I need cash! ;)

is it confusing that there is both an MRE and MTE user on the forum?! hehe

I suppose I could see the joys of a good quality solder station (especially the much larger tip selections, and quick heat/cool cycles).. So the real point here is: There are GOOD quality cheap irons, and there are cheap quality cheap irons! heh..

Looks like everyone agrees that the Cold Heat is pretty much useless for any serious work. Apparently mine had been broken before I got my hands on it, because it sounds like some of you had at least a little success with it. Irons irons irons.. wow what a lot of opinions. Personally, I have found the no need for an expensive iron. Weller's SP23L has been very reliable to me. They are cheap enough to have several irons in the various tool kits I cart around. I only wish Weller would make a cone tip for it. I would consider buying a station, just so I could use a cone tip. I honestly dont know why someone would recomend a hundred dollar iron, for a job that a $15 iron can do just fine. A 25 watt iron will do just about any job. I have only ran into one or two jobs where I needed more heat, and even with surface mount, have not needed anything less. I mean.. how often have you turned the knob?! REALLY? I would say 99 percent of the time, when working with a station (job site), I have never had need to touch the knob. Tip maintanace and soldering skill is really everything. You could spend hundreds of dollars on a station, but it wont make your solder jobs look better.

essentially two options... neither of them exactly 'simple' 1: hack out everything and figure out a way to get to the button wires and hand wire everything part by part to the midibox core. 2: Hook the thing up to a deck through some sort of Logic Analyser and figure out the control protocol, then write an interface application for Midibox. The second would be more universally usable by other people, and would be the more worthy project. Yeah.. enjoy that one. ;)

umm.. well first its not made by Coleman.. they just are one of many fools to brand it. I was concerned about using it and found one at work. Someone had bought it. Not sure how long it had been in the bottom of the tool box but I put batteries in it. and.. IT SUCKS. It could have been damaged and so maby my impressions are not appropriate. But seriously, it was ass.

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rather than strip board you could consider breadboarding it. back of the board looks sort of like |=||=| sp tjat you have a bus on the outsides, two busses on the inside (just under the center of the chips). The horizontal pin holes usually give three holes per chip pin. The reason I suggest this type of board is that you can build it and 'practice' your design on a plug in breadboard first, make changes and adjustments.. then copy it to a permanant board. so, practice on this http://www.iguanalabs.com/breadboard.htm then just buy a couple of the solder boards that match the pattern.

yeah if someone had some real heavy processing work to be done via midi control, it would be pretty sweet. Like perhaps model a SID inside the Prop? Or perhaps some sort of MP3 playback with scratching capacity.. someone surely will come up with a damn good idea. I would imagine that if not already, then soon someone will have a MIDI object written for the Prop anyway.

The answer to this question depends a lot more on you than me (or anyone else). What languages do you currently know? What languages do you want to learn? Are you comfortable with the idea of bank switching if you need to write in assembly? As to comparing hardware options, each chip has a huge family to choose from, and you can bet that if you find an AVR with x, y, and z on it, you can find a PIC with the same. The PICs unfortunately have changes from sub family to sub family, meaning that when you move up to the bigger feature chips, you might have to 'relearn' a few things (especially about its memory). What sort of features do you forsee using all the time? Most importantly.. How comfortable are you with 'going it alone?" The PIC has litterally 15 plus years of example code to draw from. The AVR is catching up certainly.. but you can find example code for virtually anything on the PIC in every imaginable language. IF you are not comfortable with the idea of not having a lot of examples to learn from, then absolutely DONT try the Propeller. Wait a few years for it to get a big following (and it will.. its a great looking chip!) How much resource do you need? PIC has a LOT of good books written about it. Myke Predko has writtin the bible on PICs and its not just recommended.. I would say its required.

yeah we beat that horse dead propper!

EXACTLY! Its the 'personality' of the MB that would be hard to replicate in any way. The feature rich nature and 'non-techie customzation' appeal. You dont have to be a programmer to make a MB do what you want it to to do. For the Prop, you would get midi and I/O objects, and the rest is your business.. kinda hard to be usefull without good programming skills. But damn one day it would be a sweet machine! Consider though that in the end, (once all that stuff is in place) it would be far more user friendly/configurable than the MB currently already is.

huh.. well.. shucks. ;) Yeah.. I have cooked one or two pics on projects before and they 'appeared to still be ok' (serial port was talking) but then I/O would not work and boom it resets or overheats or whatever.. strange lil buggers sometimes.

"definately 36.. yeah.. yeah.. 36.. definately 36 buttons." Now the previous suggestion of an external box.. starts to make a lot of sense here, as does the matrix patch concept. Make a 8x18 or whatever. Not to mention, that is doable with one MB rather than several chained MB's. It is a managable project, that could be a COMPLETEABLE challenge for a young guy just getting started in electronics. And it would be immensely usefull for music work to boot. Sure it isnt what you WANT, but you will learn to live with it, and even love it. Especially when you realize that by making it more managable, you saved yourself more than half the tedious work.

Propeller is more than capable of audio and video work. IF you get the demo board, it comes with audio and video out jacks, and can process multiple sprite movements. In fact, someone is in the process of finalising an '8-bit' style game system on chip. The I/O is fast enough to bit bang a composit video signal in parallel with two audio channels, as well as read in button presses. As to the cog/process style.. certainly you would want to push each cog to its limits before pushing a process onto another cog. For instance, one cog is capable of handling all MIDI I/O signaling, as well as the occasional serial port message (put the LCD and user buttons on a serial terminal?), not just midi in or just midi out. The idea is not to break down the whole system into a bunch of little one task processes and use up all the cogs before anything usefull gets done... more like break the whole system down into SUB-systems.. ALL MIDI I/O on cog 1, button Scan input and led output on cog 2, Analog input scanning on cog 3, Everything for the LCD/user interface and Bank stick on cog 4.. etc Consider that MOST of the process work done by current pic could be squeezed into one or two cogs by pushing them to the limits. Yes it IS a really big job, but Spin actually looks pretty easy to learn. If someone where to build up a complete MIDI I/O object to run one cog, there is LOADS of room for people to make a device as they want it. For instance, a button press scan matrix wouldnt be hard to program, using the existing button boards. Nor would the LED output code be terribly difficult. Also, once a suitable ADC is wedged between the Prop and the existing analog boards, we have what looks like a Midibox. The real hard code (as I see it) is a: the midi library (it will come with time for certain) and B: (the big one) all the processing TK has put into adding FEATURES to MB. The real intelligence in the MB is all the fancy stuff you can do with it because of morphing the inputs and outputs into usefull MIDI data.

you cant be serious. Honestly, have you measured a button? You need to account for the physical size of the button 'under the cover', the space needed for wiring (by the way you are attempting to solder wires to over 200 buttons? thats over 800 solder connections!!), you need space around the button for your fat finger, and last but certainly not least, you need structural integrity. If you riddle 200 holes into your case, that area will collapse under any sort of weight. Try pushing a button near the center of your matrix and the whole case dents in. If you SERIOUSLY need this sort of thing, then consider a new controller and display. Perhaps A-Z, plus up and down arrow, and select. So.. say you press R and the display jumps the the R section and you could continue typing and the list narrows untill the exact sound you want is only a few charactor pushes.. or you could arrow up and down.. then hit select. So, something with TEXT visual selection. not to be mean about it, but anything over 100 buttons is assinine. You should study up a bit on user interface design first.

I have been looking at the propeller for months. It really looks like a great chip to work on. I remember the dev kit being cheaper than 200.. I'll have to check that. One drawback is that there are no peripherals. A designer has to go back somewhat to the old bus days for things like analog input. Thankfully, the IO is so fast that with nothing more than a cap and possibly resistor, analog out can be bit banged. So, for MB work, it would require: 1: an entirely new software package. Why? Propeller does not work quite like anything else on the market. The code that has been developed for MB would have to be broken up and recoded into modules for Propeller, and tested. So, yeah, thats a completely new software package essentially. 2: A minor hardware redesign to get around the fact that there is no analog in.

you could try those thin metal piezo speakers they often use in hand held cheap video games made by Tiger and others. The are a thin brass round disk with a white paper coating on one side. down in there is a tiny piezo element. Normally used as a speaker, if you hook it to a volt meter and tap it, you get a signal just like any other speaker/mic. Op-amp should clean it up.

trick!! That looks way easier than the mounting the plastic bit on the switch and illuminating it from under...

http://www.kbtoys.com/genProduct.html/PID/4717118/ctid/17/INstock/Y/D/ has a 1-9 number pad, 4 directional buttons (u,d,l,r) and 6 'mode' buttons.. not to mention the typical sudoku type display. (9x9 squares, in which a number from 0-9 can be written into each square). http://www.kbtoys.com/genProduct.html/PID/2724159/ctid/17/INstock/Y/D/ apparently these have a motion sensor in them..