TheAncientOne

There is a useful application not on working perspex Here They used to publish a design for a bending jig, but that's gone now, I'll see if I cabn find a hard copy. I once made a set of display stands for a friend's shop, using 4 mm perspex, the bending rig used an old ceraminc electric heater element and some scrap metal. It heated a narrow strip of the plastic, and it would do a good bend along the 'soft' section. You need to over bend the angle as it will spring back a bit on cooling. You are better cooling it slowly, (we used a fan heater), to avoid 'crazing' of the surface. If you need to drill it, getting drills re-sharpened as in the PDF linked earlier, really helps.

Another minor reference. Cheap but complex. "Joe Cheep"

Maplin don't do those switches any more - they died with ROHS, I think. I was using them in the early 90's, and I can say that they were not the best I've ever used... very 'soggy' feeling, and quite fat pins - you'd have to drill out perfboard for them. On my P3 I used the Cherry switches as reccommended, but bought the 'Point of Sale' style legendable key caps from RS. Note that both the switch and the cap have a hole for a 3mm LED. With a bit of fiddling you can get a 3 colour one to fit - just a bit tight on the PCB. The RS ref for the caps is:Cherry POS key caps I've taken a couple of snaps to show them. Not as cheap as tacts - button and cap come to about £2, though it's a quality, long life switch. I'm going to trawl the flea markets for the higher quality Cherry keyboards, salvage the switches, and buy the new caps. This is how I plan to do a Midibox sequencer with 64 button key/lamp matrix. I can print nice symbol labels for the caps with transport control symbols and other custom labels. Printed on film, with a colour inkjet, and white LED's, you could get quite fancy, a bit of baking paper or tissue can act as a diffuser for the LED.

Just had a dig through the retro/repairs box. I've got at least two of each of these apart from top left. Anyone who could use one can have it for for postage and a small contribution/swap/postcard/. Sadly, another box of old instrument knobs etc went missing in the house move, along with a tin of Mullard 'mustard' caps I need for my Neve 1084 repro.

Theya are the famous Albs knobs, as used on Wilba's MB6582. Check the group buy threads - Goblinz has one going on for these.

@ stryd When you're building your meter, take a look at their build instructions: there is a totally cool way of forming the LED leads so that they come out nicely aligned. I think we're doing a mutual stalk here: I'm doing a pair of MNats 1176 compressor boards, (finally get to use the pair of SEW cream faced VU meters I bought just after leaving school!). I've just finished the internals for a G9 preamp, (and I've got real 'long box' Mullard ECC82's from my collection of old parts). I've also, perhaps rather ambitiously, started doing a Neve 1084 channel clone, (I nearly cried at the bill for the Carnhill ironware). Last 'character' mic preamp for now will hopefully be a Jensen double servo, using MNats and PTownKids 990 kits, (that was a soldering test!). I take it you've already had a serious letch over the kits from JLM Audio.

I just got the quote from Fedex: I need the 'plate tectonics' option. Should be with you in about 6 million years. Do you want solar flare and asteroid insurance?

Would like us to wrap it for you sir, or will you eat it now........

Just checked their shipping rates: not free over £100 like Digikey, but not bad at $25 for Fedex flat rate for any size of order. I did a bit of checking on the VAT situation. If I do the deal through my electronics company, which is VAT registered, I can do zero VAT exports to countries outside the EU. Which :D includes Serbia. If our Italian contingent have a friend in the Vatican City, that is too! Other odd bits of europe which are zero rated are: # The Aland Islands # Andorra # The Canary Islands # The Channel Islands # Gibraltar # Mount Athos # San Marino # The Vatican City Just a thought in case anyone might have a way of saving a few Euro's. I can balance the order, hopefully, between Digikey and Mouser, making up other odd bits from the UK. I think I need to knock up a text based order form in the next few days, and we can go from there. By the way, Rapid do the quite good Neutrik Jacks - and I got 50 in their last bargain offer. Neutrik Jack Sockets. They are almost as good as the legendary Rendars, (as used on old Marshall amps). Smallbear are way cool - sorted me the missing bits for my Oakley TM3030 very fast indeed. Speaking of which: At least I do have some small consolation whilst waiting to start my x0x. Now with flashing lights, (guess which supposedly professional electronics engineer put 4 LED's in backwards?). All I need to do now to attach a keyboard and tune it, oh and .... please can I have some case design lessons Sasha?

Take a look PicoCompressor. I've just built the stereo for final mixes and live work - a really good piece of design, (though contains a few mad resistor values). Pro quality kit, boards have good part spacing, proper ground planes, and go together well.

Well, sort of, that posting just reminded me - it's a very old physics geek joke like: or being a bit more subtle: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/?i=243

Which reminds me of a story: Cop pulls over Werner Heisenberg whilst he is out driving. Cop: "Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg: 'No, but I can tell you exactly where I am'. By the way - the moment you look through the grill, you lose your superposition. Perhaps a curtain might be fitted to avoid accidental glances.

I've been out of action due to illness but am back on now. Updates: the firsm I placed and order for some rare parts with seem to be a bust: they took the order, emailed an acknowledgement, then nothing. 3 weeks now. They don't reply to emails, and when I ring, don't pick up the phone. They haven't taken from my card, however, so I think they may have no stock - anybody can have a cheap price when they haven't got any to sell. For now I'm assuming the worst and looking elsewhere. I will be doing an order to Digikey, because I'm holding funds from Sasha for that, but I need to make sure we're not splitting things without need. Am I right in thinking that a mouser order is need for some of the pots? Hope to be back u to speed in the next few days. I have a Farnell account, so the tempco's are easy from here - as are the resonators. Best wishes to all Mike

Excellent Kit. Built mine over the last couple of nights. A bit of a test of stamina in the soldering department, but all went fairly smoothly. Now for the hard bit - getting Pd up and doing something useful with it. No way I could afford the Stribe and Max/MSP! Since the Arduino and USB interface both unplug, it shouldn't be too hard to do an alternative MIDIbox I/O too. Has anyone done anything on MIDIbox to softpots? Thanks Phineus, a great design.

Sifam are UK based. They also make very good panel meters. I've got some salvaged Sifam collet knobs, which are destined for my MIDIbox FM, and possibly sequencer, if I can't get the nice thin Re-An push on encoder knobs. The Sifam Collets have different colour cap options, and the pointer part is a separate fitting, (you can get pointers, skirts and scales). See picture. Good, but expensive. RS one off price works out at 2.3 Euro each, plus cap/skirt/pointer etc. (Eeek!)

Me too! I'm waiting on his mailing list for the day he deices to do another batch of boards. Surface mount hell though!

Some of you might be interested in this - its a combination compressor/noise gate/distortion box, actually aimed at synth use rather than guitars etc, so I thought I'd repost it here. There are no really exotic parts in the design, apart from the THAT chips in the compressor and noise gates - and I'll do a bulk buy of these if need be. http://burnit.co.uk/sdiy/index.php?page=boxotrix Seb is a long time contributor to the SDIY list. Be sure to take a look at the other projects on his site. email is: seb[at]burnit[dot]co[dot]uk Remove square bracketed bits to email - I'm doing my bit to keep his spam quota down.

HKSS is always going to be controversial. Some of the stuff they sell is your basic clone copy - cheap knobs, pots, so-called 'Monster' cables etc. Sometimes it gets worse. caveat emptor, ("let the buyer beware") as the UK motto goes. I always tell friends "If it seems too good to be true, it probably is". If you go to http://search.retrosynth.com/synth-diy/search/search.cgi and search on 'counterfeit', you'll find one documented case at least. There are more. Whether the problem is HKSS themselves or their suppliers. I don't know. chipforbrains is a more serious synth rebuilt supplier, who has has specialist rare panels and pots made, and to quite good quality, (I know, because I have used them in repairs), as well as supplying NOS, (New Old Stock), parts. I think the enmity comes from HKSS muscling in on his market, and allegedly trying to sabotage his auctions. There are current reports of phony SN76477's, and a while ago a bunch of CA3280's was doing the rounds. One trick is to label the blank chips used for setting up pick and place machines. Often theses an sanded to make the tops flat, before being screend as whatever the robbers wants you to believe they are selling. Another current fraud is in fake USB memory sticks that report as 2G or more, but have trick software in them to hide their actual small content until you start to load them up. These are old stock dodged up to make a quick buck. We are not alone in this. The US military gets stiffed with bogus parts too - fake connectors that literally melt under load being one example. This is worse than your synth not working, these fakes can kill people. As well as the flood of fake 'new' parts, the NOS market is full of dangers: specialist RAM re-badged to make it seem faster, old specialised 'jungle chips' rebadged to look like expensive TRW multipliers etc. The problem for the dealers is that they are often impossible to test without incurring very high costs, so they are taken in at face value, and the unfortunate customer gets to do the testing. http://www.edn.com/article/CA497033.html?text=counterfeit%3E Playbo$$'s caps were one of the rawest ripoff's I've seen for a while. Power transistors are another nightmare - I know this from bitter experience - a batch of 2N3773's I bought for repair stock, from a reputable dealer turned out to be rebadged 2N3055's, ( I opened one up in desperation). I got replacement parts ,but lost a major repair customer, I'd repaired H&H amps for him for years. 6 worked for a while on the bench and blew in the field. We lost the trail at the importer, who had also been ripped off: no-one was compensated for the consequential loss which must have run into the £100,000's region, (the importer had bought something like 25,000 transistors, which had been sent all over the UK). Let's be careful out there folks.

This picture shows a quick bootup of the Pure:Dyne CD on my old basic windows machine. I just put the CD in the drive and rebooted. I didn't bother to resize the desktop - it's a bit high res' here. It's got 'Jack' running, Hydrogen, (the drum machine), running a cowbell loop (!), a softsynth, and the nano editor running. This is an old P3/1000 with 512Meg of RAM, I took the photo, then removed the disk to reboot into Windows 2000. For working, you can arrange to save your data and settings to a USB stick, (a process called 'Nesting'). It won't run on some of the wierder graphics cards - my engineering box has an old 3D labs 'Wildcat', which locks up. It will boot and run, though not that fast, on my ancient Compaq Armada 733MHz laptop. Hope this helps.

Take a look at Pure:Dyne, a Linux distro aimed at Music/Multimedia people. They do a bootable CD that you can use for a tryout. https://devel.goto10.org/puredyne I has Soft synths, the successor to Max, A drum machine and quite a lot more. I was able to boot the CD and take it on line quite easily. It will store you data on a spare hard disc partition, or a USB stick, so you can boot up a PC as a DAW, then reboot into whatever you use normally. Obviously, you can do a proper install if you really like it. Hope this helps

I've just been doing some searching and shopping. If the company has got enough stock, I can let 8 people have a pack of some of the rare parts as follows: 1 BA6110 1 LA4140 1 2SC2291 3 2SC1583 For a cost of £4.60 plus carriage/packing/PayPal fee. I am prepared to do a big order to Digikey then post out as follows: Rotary Switches (2) Pots (5) Encoder (1) All the above have to be the specified parts or they won't fit the boards I could also get the FT232 USB chip on the same order. If you want in. PM me with what you want - I reckon the best way to keep postage etc down is to do one post out - so get as many parts in the one order as possible. I'll detail final costs once the quantities are known - you're going to get the Digkey cost plus expenses anyway. Would any other parts be of interest - like the tact switches, or a bulk lot of flat top LED's? I could do a batch of resonators, and the tempco's from Farnell. I could do a bulk order of the processor, and program them too, if needed - but people wanting programmed units would have to wait until my board was built up, then I could test the processors before dispatch. Over to you, people..... (edited to add tempco's and resonator suggestions).

Emacs cartoon - kind of appropriate: http://xkcd.com/378/ Enjoy

The early Philips/Marantz CD players had a 14 bit D->A with samples cranked out at 4 times the normal bitrate. They sounded way better and smoother than their contemporary 16 bit machines. This of course was in the days before bitstream type converters, and where the laser trimming of the 16 bit D->A's was well inside the bit accuracy. The best advantage was that they could throw away the horrible 'brick wall' anti aliasing filter, with all it's attendant passband ripple problems and ringing, and replace it with a nice smooth simpler filter, rolling off from the much higher frequency. A lot of the quality effects in some of the high end converters come from creative use of dither in the low bits. A pattern locked dither can introduce artefacts of its own, but careful pseudo-random amounts can sound better. The old near legendary Cambridge converters used stacked Philips chips - four if I remember. And we all know why "24 bit audio" is a lie, don't we? For reference, by the way, dither and jitter are separate things. I agree with the comment about the 12 bit Rolands - a positive accurately timed 12 bits can sound more nameitive than time splattered 14 bits or more. I'm with you on the earplugs line: a friend has just spent £200 on some braided speaker cable - and the makers say it has to be 'run in', which I think is a crafty way to get outside the guarantee period. Don't get me started on zero feedback triode class A amps......

I have been buying some old hand held games called 'Lights Out' on ebay etc. they have a 5x5 button matrix, and in the case of the later "Lights Out 2000" model, a bi-colour matrix. They seem pretty reliable - they are meant to be 'Child Proof' after all, and I'm thinking of cutting some down to make an LED/button matrix. I've been paying £4 to £5 each for them The lights are a bit dim due to battery power.

A quick warning: stick some labels over the windows on those EPROM's. Daylight will erase them as well as UV, just a bit more slowly. A camera flash gun can do the same - almost as fast as UV. If it were mine, and it had been a few days in open light 'topless', I'd be thinking of reading the EPROM's for safety backup, then re-writing them. Thanks for posting this. I'm going to be keeping my eyes open for on, definitely, having seen the build. Best wishes