TheAncientOne

Glad to hear you're back Nebs - it happens to us all sometimes - and more often than not, in waves. I've had a bit of this myself recently, and I can sympathise. Best wishes for a speedy return to full action.

Boards landed here in the UK. A nice surprise on returning from a weekend of gig work. A great job. Thanks for all the hard work.

Thoughts: This is just me brainstorming a bit - nothing tried or tested here, for your application. Use SMT LED's - they can be more easily wired with fine "pen wiring" type wire. You might need to think of making some tools to help with the job, (it seems a bit like making a "ship-in-a-bottle"). Strip down some old telephone handset cords for the ultra flexible 'tinsel' cable. Use flexible fibre optics, don't put the LEDs in the ball at all, just the fibre ends. Use the Polymer type, not the glass type. Think of having a non-moving connector on the stick, and a flexible 'bridge' wire to a connector on the control board. This can then easily be replaced as it flexes and wears out. You need no more than 6 cores, unless you want to make patterns. Hope this is a start (edited for yptos)

I think I sent 1 yellow, 1 clear, and 2 purple. Though the last 2 could be the other way around. Thought it might be easier to tell them apart. Only had 4 blue to start with. The guy might have a few more. He had some a few Cybiko Xtremes too, but at 4 times the price.

I think I have Purple and Clear left, I only had a few blue. Sorry I didn't realise I sent two the same colour. Shall I cut the leads off the power units, so that you have the plug part, or can you just buy a suitable one locally? Let me know and I'll post them off.

<Angelic Prof whispers in Stryd's ear> "packing & carriage to Australia about Au$34" <Advocatus Diaboli Prof replies>"Will probably operate this Velleman Relay card

If it proves impervious to restarts, send it back and I'll send over one of the spares I've kept, (just the unit). By the way, if anyone else is interested, I have 7 left.

The waxiest bits are the three 'dog bone' ceramic capacitors in the phase shift oscillator, (top left of Karnaugh map display), I wonder now how I managed to get it to oscillate at all with the tolerance on those things. If I run it up again, I'll put 3 'period' polystyrenes in. It was an early eaxmple of a vector drawing system. The oscillator provided two 90o phased sine waves direct one to the 'Y' axis, and draw a '1'. Direct one to the 'Y' axis and the other to the 'X' axis and draw a '0'. A 4 x 4 grid was drawn by the 7493 and some gating to the cluster of resistors, (the diagonal ones), bottom right. The sine waves were added to provide the 'O's and '1's. The IC socket, bottom right was for the jig that held the circuit that wou wanted to draw a map for. Limited to 4 inputs. First time I got it running I'd mixed the x and Y data, getting the right map but out of order, took a lot of head scratching for my 18 year old self! @ Stryd, Perhaps, in view of the possible thread deviation, you could move it to 'misc'. If you do, I'll make an attempt to run it up and get a scope picture or two.

Wimps! I did my school projects on Veroboard! ( I Actually did ---- in 1972) The big board on the ancient vero is a Karnaugh map display, which ran on a scope, from a design in 'Wireless World'. The second is a never completed spare board for a switched gain lab amp using an early Plessey Op Amp, the SL701C, published in 'Practical Electronics'. I think I ought to run it up, just to see if it works. My layout and soldering have improved a bit since then.

Found a resource with some hardware hacks and remote control ideas - which is partly what I wanted mine for anyway, (wireless domestic remote control unit). This guy is good, and has quite a few resources, including the SDK http://www.dbzoo.com/wiki/cybiko/cybiko

I knew I shouldn't have handled those chips from Wilda without gloves. I've got bulk buyer syndrome! Now the proud, (temporary, I hope), owner of a pile of Cybikos. They are Cybiko Classic, mk 2, (they use the <ESC> key for on/off). They are not that light; I can post 2 in 1 bubble envelope. That keeps the cost within the Royal Mail maximum size, and keeps us out of the clutches of Parcelforce or Fedex. Looks like packing & carriage to europe, airmail, will be about 11.50 Euro/pair. Thinking on the bright side, even with the PayPal percentage, they will run to less than 12 Euro each, delivered. Surface mail makes about one euro difference, (cheaper). He did have some Xtreme models, but he wanted 4 times the price for them :( Plese memo me your PayPal details, and delivery addresses. If you are a non-european destination, I can post them first, then Paypal you. For Doug, or anyone else in the 'states, on a batch of four, it might be worth unpacking them and sending them without the main box etc, I'll weigh the one I'm testing and get back on that.

Good point - I think they are classics I'll know later today

A local wholesaler is clearing a job lot of brand new Cybikos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko I have to buy them by the box, so if anyone is interested, say as a wireless synth controller, then they will be about 10 Euro a pair, 18 Euro for 4, carriage at cost. I have only a short time to get them, so if anyone is interested, let me know ASAP. I'm getting one batch tomorrow, and will get some more if people on the group want them. First Batch all gone If anyone is still interested, the supplier has a few more left

I think I will do one last rare parts run, if I can. So if a kit is needed, then you shall go to the ball Stryderella. Just be sure to get your soldering done before midnight......

There was a note on the AdaFruit forum that she might not be doing any more kits, because of part supply problems. We share your pain Limor!! She will still be doing parts like the processor, panels and PCBs.

First Mouser order has landed! - 2 days from the USA, well worth the $25 Fedex fee, in this case. @ Kartoshka - I've memoed you - you are on the list now!

I will try and do another rare parts batch when I've finished the main order. I'll be trying for some 2044's at the same time. In the mean time, the Mouser order is in and I've received a dispatch note. For those who wanted cap kits, I've had to get Panasonic 68nF in the UK because Mouser were out of stock, and it would have stretched the delivery time. Grayhills will be back in stock at Digikey soon, though the Panasonic pots are still proving a problem, (long lead time on the plastic spindle parts). I'm looking for other sources. Mike

I'll email - check the other thread about the NKK switch. edited to add - switches en-route from Farnel - actually cheaper than Mouser or Digikey.

UK Farnell have the NKK B12AB (though the R0 does not match anything in the NKK PDF brochure - and it woudl only be optional coloured caps anyway). They are 2.23 Euro including VAT I can out some on my next Farnell UK order if that will help - next week. They are non-stock at Digikey, though Mouser have then at 2.88 euro including VAT. I might just get the whole batch in from Farnell at this rate, along with the tempco's.

I'd been thinking more SPI than I2C, and using a second processor to off load the file system from the main processor, though the filing I/O and display etc wouldn't mean that much of an off-load. I still like the idea of a local processor to do the filing system 'primitives', given the cost of the hardware, but I'm not competent enough in PIC design to analyse the hardware/software trade off. My thinking was coloured by my work with CF. IDE already does quite a lot of the filing primitive worK, SCSI does a bit more. It might be possible to have a similar thing for SD. A point I'd forgotten: where are the life extending algorithms for the SD?, (the software that prevents spurious erase and write cycles, to optimise the cards working life) are they in the card, or do they need to be implemented outside? Card would still be a very good idea though. Best wishes Mike

I did some work using CF a while back. The I/O is parallel, a CF card effectively looks like an IDE drive. This is very good for fast cameras where transferring data to the card is the bottleneck. In the world of microcontrollers as used in the MIDIbox, a serial peripheral interface is better: it only uses a few pins, and the interface is going to be fast enough anyway. CF are good for booting micro PC's from, and for very fast large block data. They can virtually be interchanged with small hard discs, (in fact, some of the bigger camera cards were small hard discs). They are physically large, and have a complex socket which needs a minimum of 20-something connections. CF pairs very well with the older PCMCIA/PC-Card slots, being virtually a straight through interface that needs no real drivers, (the new ExpressCard has trashed that, of course) SD are the other common standard, (along with smaller MicroSD and XD). They are small, serial and come in sizes well big enough for our purposes. They seem to be a lot cheaper too. As camera cards get bigger, we can recycle the smaller ones for MIDIbox. As TK says, the FAT files interface is going to be a challenge, and if it's going to be a challenge for TK, then I'm not even going to take a look at it! Perhaps one approach might be to go modular: add another micro to the SD card interface, and make the card subsystem look like a big stack of banksticks. Select banks by simple title or number, (no long file names, thank goodness), and only 'see' certain file types. Don't allow file operations beyond load/save/delete from the MIDIbox. MIDIbox generated file names might have to be of the generated form FILENN.XXX. Set up a simple list of XXX extensions for MIDIbox. ".SV3", ".SQ3", ".SID" or whatever, and refuse operations on others, (apart from perhaps 'delete', with a good 'are you sure' system). Date/Time would have to be set as defaults, unless someone wants to interface an I2C real time clock, (not that hard, thinking about it - I've got a feeling there might be a handle waiting in MIOS for just that too, knowing TK). Do your file renaming and 'housekeeping' on the PC. With regard to sockets, I wouldn't think of buying in yet: the sockets are easy. The board they go on is going to be the hard part. It has to hold the socket, (more easily available in surface mount), and some flexible way of panel mounting it. An activity light is nearly essential, (to avoid pulling the card during a write), and there might well be some I/O parts. A panel bezel with a simple screw mount would be good as well - plenty of design things to be digging in to, and group buy of sockets, PCB's and bezels would be even more useful. Just a few thoughts. In my case it was work for a FORTH based data logger running on the late lamented TDS series of cards, we had to use CF - SD hadn't come out at that time, and I shudder to remember just what a 512K card cost back then. We did have an RTC, the main effort was doing a low power mode to get maximum battery life. I think the final version would run 2/3 months in the field. TK: you never cease to surprise us! Best wishes

Been there and done it in the 70's. Looks good on full cycle, once you're using a shorter sequence length it gets lame very quickly. If you have multiple pots/layers the inner ones are very cramped. Would be very good as a virtual, where the circle would reformat to the number of steps. As a real - just mock it up with a card panel and some spare knobs - you'll soon see what I mean. A few of the guys on the elctro music forum have done it too: this is an MOTM format version of Ray Wilsons 16 stepper. There are 8 videos in total. <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value=" name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src=" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>

I've saved an old 3 inch (75mm) 'scope tube for just that reason. A lot of the hard part of a scope design is not needed, (no time-base or triggering), but interpreting the data sheet for a CRT is not easy, and I still can't work out how the focus electrodes need to work. The deflection voltage needs to swing something like 400 Volts. With a small tube, the Final Anode Voltage is not that high, (If I remember right, about 1.5 - 2 KV), so a simple inverter and multiplier would do it. Sadly, it has to be a 'scope tube; the ones from those little cheap televisions are magnetic deflection, and there would be far too many problems, for me, in making one linear and fast enough. http://www.sphere.bc.ca/test/crts.html These guys have a lot, though not cheap! I got mine in some surplus scrap. You might be able to pull some of the Russian ones, which are, if I remember, pretty good.

I have to own up to being a bit of an unusual clock fetishist. I just saw this and Dammit! they're sold out. My last unusual clock was this one, from http://dutchtronix.com/ScopeClock.htm#FirmwareV3

The guy I did the x0xb0x rare parts from usually has some. Once I'm a little more sorted, (and the broadband now seems to be OK at least), I'll ask.