TheAncientOne

Here is a note on how to secure the USB connector on the 1st generation boards. Simply scrape off the solder mask coating below the socket support pins, bend up a wide "U" as shown from some thick copper wire, (I used 1mm2 solid mains wiring cable core), solder it between the support pins then flood the scraped area with solder. You may need a 20 Watt or better iron. The first picture shows how it was done, the other is simply a picture of the top surface, with a picture of the world's simplest MIDI tester, a DIN Plug with an LED soldered in to it: thanks to Hinton Instruments MIDI pages for the tester and a few other tricks. And now a special offer for those that are worried by soldering surface mount: As a donation to the missing chips fund, the best offer of at least 15 Euro, (to be sent to TK's Paypal account), gets this board, and the tester. Postage to be paid to me at cost. I'll close the offer on Sunday 19th October. (Board is fully tested and working fine under XP, loop-back tested with MIDI-OX) [edit] Offer still holds as a donation for development. [2nd Edit] - no takers? OK I'll run with plan B then.....

I got mine from RS: uk_rs-online_com These are from Tyco. Pricing, plus 17.5% UK VAT Quantity Price Each 20 £0.095 500 £0.085 2000 £0.075 5000 £0.065 10000 £0.055 A quick 'back of an emvelope' calculation suggests a price of about 12 Euro for 100 posted to Europe. Rapid have these: www_rapidonline_com] They are by Diptronics, and are a bit cheaper, Quantity Price Each 1 £0.12 100 £0.08 500 £0.06 1000 £0.05 Working out at about 9.5 Euro for 100, posted to Europe. If people are interested, I can stick a few on my next Rpaid order and check them for fit. If I do a bulk order, it will be for a batch, 'Wilba Stylee', where you can have 100 or 200 etc, and I'll do either 10 or 20 sets. A thought anyway.

Mine landed in the UK on Saturday. Thanks for all your hard work.

100%

I've just had a thought. People who got PT-10's for the group buy I did probably have the original silk screened panel too. Perhaps some of us could post Doug our spare panels, then he would have a few extras. I was originally going to get them direct without panels to save carriage etc, but it was cheaper, in the end, to buy from a UK distributor and get free carriage in the UK. Just a thought

Try the 'wayback machine' http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.webone.com.au/~mydav/calliope.htm Got it first shot! You will probably find some pictures missing though. Hope this helps

That is because they are 'pull down' links - the link grounds the input, resulting in a '0'. Don't worry about getting confused, it happens a lot, worse when someone uses a similar convention for DIP switches so that link 'off' = switch 'on'.

Last parts arrived today! I will have one spare of hardware and parts (but not rare parts) set, I can't do any more for now, (I was going to, but the Greyhills are out of stock again). The accounting is not going to be fun, with a varying Dollar, a base currency of £UK, and most payments in Euros! Last packing this weekend, I hope.

I don't have the time to do the mailouts at the moment, being up to my eyes in x0xb0x stuff, but I do have a full RS trade account. If it can wait until the beginning of October, I'll do it. They pack best in ones or twos, any more needs multiple packages. If Goblinz or someone in the UK could do the paperwork/wiki stuff, that would help a lot.

I picked up a couple of 10Mbit 1U hubs/switches this week for £5. They have nice internal power supplies if needed, and can be 'repanelled' with some alloy. I was lucky, they we on their way to the skip, (but I always pay the scrap man, that way he saves things for me). I'm thinking of bodging up a simple MIDI activity light system, (probably pulse stretchers based around 4069s). Is this of interest, and are separate in and out lights best? Since I'm thinking professional for my multi in/out system, I'm using metal DIN sockets, with plug on leads at the board end, It only needs one tripped over MIDI cable to write off a DIN socket, and de soldering the board mounted ones is a nasty job. The basic single in/out one is going in a the smallest box I can fit it in for laptop and test use. Ther is a lot of good raw MIDI advice and info at Hinton Instruments. Especially the worlds cheapest MIDI tester.

I think Seppoman is absolutely right. Don't forget to factor in time if doing kits, (and the algorithm starts something like "take your best guess and double it"). The savings on parts can easily get lost in shipping and tax. Cimo's idea sounds good, let the kits have a nice break in the sun, and post out to the EEC from there. I bought my boards from Smash, and got the parts locally. Smash's kit now seems a pretty good deal, (for example, it took several goes to sort the trimpots out, between size and available stocks), on time saved alone and it would have been cheaper.

As a reference point, Farnell UK do them at: 1+ £10.91 + VAT = £12.82 ~= 15.89 Euro 10+ £8.58 + VAT = £10.08 ~= 12.49 Euro 100+ £6.88 + VAT = £ 8.08 ~= 10.02 Euro Euro conversion from www.xe.com on date of posting. I have an account, though for 100 of these I'd have to get money up front, and they are not showing that many in stock - so it might be worth looking at the TI lead time before ordering any larger numbers.

I finished my first couple of the GM5 interfaces. Testing with an XP laptop shows they work OK. Then I tried under Windows 2000, (my main machines run this due to the fact that they are a) Old, and b) need to be compatible with certain clients). Plug in Module, get the "Found New Hardware", then "Ploytec USB" bit, then when it's about to go and search for a device driver, I get an alarming spontaneous reboot. Tried this with 3 different machines, all with Win 2K, though as a common factor, all have different AsusTek motherboards. Same each time. Is this a message from Bill saying 'Upgrade' ? Has a more advanced MIDI system ever been done for Win 2000? Has anybody seen any marbles aound here? Thanks

Some of my random thoughts on the subject - it started as a reply, then just grew. There is a probably apocryphal story that, when in exile in London, the late Hailie Selassie, (or Ras Tafari if you prefer), was taken to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Upon being asled which piece he liked the most, he said 'The first one', a few other questions revealed that he was referring to the orchestra tuning up. Perhaps amongst our joint book stack, some of us have a copy of Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance", in which he discusses retrospectively a man who attacked the amazingly thorny question of whether 'Quality' is subjective or objective. The book's character eventually suffers a nervous breakdown, when he breaks through the main question into the more difficult territory of our sheeplike acceptance of Aristotelian logic as a model for discussion of concepts. That's a major snag with a lot of institutional learning: things have to be cut up and partitioned. This is one such problem. I remember reading Van Vogts 'Null-A' series at school a long time ago, but unlike most readers, then going off and digging into general semantics, to find that I agreed with most of it. There are few absolutes here, (I know - that's self referencing already). Perhaps a beginning definition is "assembly of one or more sounds" We could even go EBNF and get music ::= sound { sound } We can't even define as 'arrangment', because, for instance, a stochastic compostion might have the same sounds in varying order each performance, yet in other areas, arrangement of sounds is everything, ( you can play a Bach score on most pitched imstruments, change the order and it's not Bach any more). This will even encompass Cage's famous (or notorious - your call), 4' 33", because it was intended to get the listener to focus on the sounds around them, This link is, in my opinion, a good article on the subject and similar things: "The Sounds of Silence" This hits another interesting point. 'musical sounds', are not only subjective, but contextual. the contextual bit is kind of important. A lot of dance music is perfect in it's environment, bass shaking your body, lights going, the heady atmosphere of excited moving bodies. Listened to on overspill from a car sound system it can be genuinely irritating, (especially when you're having a quiet 3.00am coding session). My long ago sampled pile driver made for intense bass percussion in a dance track, but would be real noise to those in the neighbourhood, after a long afternoon of it. Some forms of musical experience are inseparable from their performance, other, perhaps more pure ones, stand alone. Certain, possibly better informed musicians differentiate between live recorded and studio recorded works. Robert Fripp Diary entry on the subject Some music can only exist as recordings, especially some early synth work, computer composition, and most 'concrete' forms, it's no less musical for being recorded only. Music evolves. Not many people would consider the 'Rite of Spring' at all rock and roll or radical, yet it's first attempted performance ended prematurely in a riot. Does this make Igor Stravinsky the spiritual father of punk? Face it, the Pistols only managed to get their act banned, I never heard of them starting a real live riot in the hall, (and remember Altamont had more to do with Hells Angels than the 'Stones). Some of the more avante-garde composers are probably just steps in the chain, and will be forgotten as composers, whereas some of their ideas may live on in greater works. The Mannheim School are a classical example, experimenting with advanced orchestration and composition, and were very famous in their day. Nobody really gives concerts by Stamitz or Filtz or Holzbauer any more, but a certain Mr Mozart, who visited Mannheim, did rather better. Latterly IRCAM poured millions of Francs into electronic music, but the most obvious contribution so far is in core digital synth design, and 'Max'. Lots of interesting noises, but no standout composition. The 'R' for research in the name being the key, I think. My personal take on Cage is a negligible composer, but an important contributor to the evolution of music. The real posers being the fanboys. Stockhausen anyone? Some kinds of music I actually find mildly repellent. I would, of choice, stay out of somewhere it was being played. A subjective analysis could thereby classify it as noise, but it could easily pass many textbook definitions of music. It's still passing the 'emotional impact' test too, just providing a negative one. We are in one of the evolutionary transition phases now. For a long time a composer could only provide a map of his ideas, as a score, or earlier still, by teaching it to someone else. Now a musician can give an exact rendition of his ideas, and even that can be edited or remixed or sampled. Back to the General Semantics, (which is a core idea behind NLP for those interested). The score is not the performance, the map is not the terrain. Music, like light, can be defined in more than one way, sometimes an objective definition will be good, sometimes a subjective one. We have a great nebulous definition cloud, with probably as many parameters as a modular synth. Thinking of the modular for a moment, it can probably be proven that the number of patches that will produce no sound at all, is greater than that which will make noise, (consider all other patches multiplied by the parameters "Volume=0" or "output not connected" if you really need to dig into that one). Musical definition clouds are probably the same. A very hard at the core, and vapourously thin at the edges, depending upon which parameters you have set. There will be many more "sounds-which-are-not-music", than sounds which are, but in the overlap zone things get pretty hazy At the end of the day, I'm kind of there with Hailie Selassie. Last year, on a summer Saturday afternoon, whilst unloading the Roissy kit at the Barn where it's kept, Howard our driver, an ex-RAF engineer, hearing a small sound in the distance said "Spitfire!". We looked up, in time to see a lone Spitfire, on it's way back from an air display fly directly over the farmyard. It was low enough to see details, and the loud snarly roar of the Merlin engine was definitely music to my ears. The whole thing a small impromptu performance, with it's own emotional charge. Thereby hangs another point too - that emotional charge was partly due the knowledge of what it was, and what that meant. Like the miners say, "Gold is where you find it".

I did the Euro bulk buy last time. I got them from ACAL in the UK. Their on-line buying system seems to have changed since last year, however. http://www.acaltechnology.com/index.php One thing I think worth mentioning is to try and get a multiple of the standard box quantity, (about 18), because, if not well packed, they tend to scratch each other in transit - I had to get some replaced, which took time. The manufacturers box is very sturdy and keeps the boxes from touching each other . I ended up getting them with panels in the end, because ACAL did not charge carriage in the UK, and Pactec did, so The UK deal worked out a bit cheaper, especially when one considered the Customs fees. Digikey seem to have the best delivery system with regard to paying the VAT from abroad, for me - you just pay the actual amount to the driver. Mouser use Fedex; you will gat a VAT and Customs bill through the post after dleivery, so don't go doing the final accounts until you have it. In the UK, avoid anyone that uses Parcelforce as their final carrier, if you can: they add a usurious £13.50 'clearence fee' to the customs and VAT invoice. On a truckload of parts it's not bad, on a small parts order it's nasty! Hope this is of help.

I know they've done that in Salford and around Manchester, and done clubs/band promo in my area, (possibly to raise funds for other events), so it's quite possible that they have. Been some really good Goth/Darkwave parties in the Bradford area, and the "One in Twelve" is right behind the photo studio I was building when my avatar pic was taken. Will be back there soon, perhaps we could meet up then.

Thanks for the hearing tip - years of doing PA in the 70's - 80's and I never found that one. Best unobtrusive hearing protection for gigs were some ex RAF ones I blagged. Had a pressure membrane in them that allowed quiet sounds through but kept jet noise down. Sadly they were disposables and are long gone, and I never found the makers There is also 'quasi legal: or 'private', eg: http://www.gashcollective.com/GASHfest/home.htm They're my local outlaw crew.

Well you could get down to Custard Factory tonight and hear it for yourself. For me, a brief experience during "Mad Professor's" set in Manchester last December, said very heavy dense bass sound, loud to the point pf 'ice picks in your ears', bass was very much a block of sound. Hard to form any opinion of clarity at that volume level - 30% of your hearing has shut down by then. Probably very good if all you like is D&B, I would expect it to sound awful with another musical style. Like any good Reggae sound system, makes the kind of bass you can feel through your partner's body. For me, the Holy Grail of sound systems is still Ben Duncan's Ambisonic system experiment as used by Underworld at Glastonbury years ago. I heard it on test and was amazed, As an aside, back in the 70's as a skint student, I augmented my income by repairing amps for people. One Saturday afternoon two black guys with heavy Jamaican accents turned up at my digs with a huge amp on a built in trolley. It had been built by an old guy in Liverpool from a GEC design. 2 x V1505 triodes transformer driven. 1100 Watts of valve power. Had it's own bias metering built in, and an HT rail of 2.5KV. I've only done one repair job that scared me more than that. The builder was a stone pro: it was like a textbook layout under the chassis - all hand wired on tagstrip. It used 2 KT66's for drivers, (that's the output stage of a Quad Valve Amp). For those interested here is the circuit diagram The builder in Liverpool hand wound his own transformers. If anyone is really interested, I have the famous GEC book, with all the details, and a few other dewign s too - including a multi pair 400 Watt amp containing 10 (small mortgage!), KT88's, I can scan up anything of interest. (edit for yptos and added valve amps stuff)

Sasha, I'm just as stressed as you are, at the moment, though for different reasons. I can't get the final accounting done without at least a full days work, ( I have prices in Dollars and Pounds and payments in Euros. which makes it rather more difficult than I thought to price up everybody's lists). Other things have been a bit difficult here at the moment I'll pm you with some finance stuff now. I emailed you earlier. Best wishes Mike

Another small note: In the add on board parts list section of http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp/mbhp_usb_gm5_orderlist.txt There are 4 x 1N4148 Diodes missing from the list. and a question: I'm probably being a bit stupid here, but where do I find the custom Windows driver? - I can't obviously find it on http://www.ploytec.de/

Just found another SD card driver - FAT32 - for a card based MP3 player. C code targeted at PIC. http://www.andyolivares.com/?page_id=6 Hope it's of interest

Now twiddling my soft touch knobs in the UK. Thanks again Nebula!

The people I got them from have a few more, anyone else interested? They also have a few of the later 'Cybiko Xtreme' models, though these would be around 17 Euro each. I'm using mine for a remote control. The Velleman kit mentioned in an earlier post looks like it will work. I'll report back once I've tried them out.

Nah! That's for designers and builders, not for doing the shopping.

U have a few pasrt still to get in, (encoders, preset pots and tempco's), but the main bulk is in - Digikey delivered today. I am now the proud, (temporary) owner of 64 Greyhill switches and a block of Panasonic pots. The encoder specified by Limor, theCT3011-ND, has a short 6mm sgaft with a flat. Sasha send me a picture showing just how short it is. This is on back order for months. They do have stock of the CT3007-ND which has a round, longer shaft. The shaft might need cutting down, and you needed a flat, you'd have to file one, (not too hard IMHO). Shall I go for these? If anyone who wasn't handy with a file didn't mind waiting until I'd built up one of my Sasha x0x, I could cut and file a spindle for them. I'd expect a drink token for that though!