m00dawg

I hope this is in the right topic - seemed closest anyway, but I apologize if I got it wrong either way :) Is it possible that the link to the forums in midibox.org could be updated? It's pointing to forums.midibox.org instead of midibox.org/forum. The problem is that forums.midibox.org is in a different namespace and, at least I think, that's causing SMF not to be able to read the login cookie. The end result is that the first link throws you into the forum without being logged in, which means you can't see which posts have been updated or not, etc. Simply clicking Home on the forum fixes it, but it would be ideal if the link could simply be updated, or someone put in a redirect from forums.midibox.org to midibox.org/forum. On an aside, is there any way to donate to the cause? Technically or otherwise, but I was mostly referring to hosting costs. I can't imagine all this is hosted for free, and I know I would donate given the chance (even if it is just a marginal amount if many people did that, it might help out). Just a thought.

For single row (SIL) headers, you have to generally use a special crimp tool (they are inexpensive at your local hardware store) and crimp the wires individually. Smash has a quick how-to on this: http://www.avishowtech.com/mbhp/crimp.html For DIL headers, it's much easier because you can do it all at once and don't need a special tool (though you have to be more careful). There's a good how-to on it but I can't find the link. Basically, you just feed the cable into the crimp connector, align the wires so that they fit inside the metal teeth in the connector and squash it down with a pair of pliers. Then you bend the wire back and put the tug guard on and call it done. Err, well it's better with pictures :) Might want to do a Google search on how to do that as I'm sure you'll find something useful. The only time these type of connectors suck is when you have to change around wires - something you might have to for hooking up an LCD screen to core. For instance, if pin 1 of CORE goes to pin 7 of the LCD. There's a few ways to solve that one though (I think most people just solder directly to the LCD module, but I just made an ugly monster cable and re-arranged the cables by cutting the cable and resoldering.

Congrats! My only suggestion is, next time, spend a few bucks on some crimp connectors from Smash and use pin headers. Makes things more clean and easily configurable in the future. I can't tell from the picture, but don't forget to jumper the audio in pins as well or otherwise you might get more noise from the SID.

I like option 2 myself. It's fun and you can customize the PSU to your specific app.

I don't have the pinouts in front of me, but I recall originally being able to attach my CORE to my SID module using an old floppy ribbon cable (before I started making them on my own) and it worked like a champ. So the connections shouldn't be all that complicated, in other words. In fact (and again I don't have my synth in front of me), I though it was straight through 1-1. In other words, pin 1 on CORE goes to pin 1 on SID, pin 2 to pin 2, etc.

8.92V might just be due to error from the multimeter (they need to be calibrated every so often) but someone else might want to chime in on that one. It "should" be ok, but don't quote me on that.

Ok so here's what you can do. First, test your wallwart with your multimeter (be sure to put your multimeter in AC or DC depending on what wallwart you are using - AC is highly recommended as DC wallwarts are switched and can produce noise). If it's reading around what it should (it may be higher with no load), then plug it into your board and start testing your connections. Start with the header pins to make sure they are getting the same voltage, then test the bridge rectifier pins (the ones from the header first). If that works, switch your multimeter to DC and test the -/+ of the rectifier and keep going part-by-part until you find something out of whack. Of special importance is your regulator - it should have a clean 9V (or 12V if you are using a 6581 SID) between the output pin and ground. If it doesn't, you know it's something with the regulator or a component before it. If that works, lather rinse and repeat until you've tested every component up to the pins on the socket. Chances are by that point you should find something wrong hopefully :) Good luck!

Sounds like your socket is not getting any power, which is unrelated to the CORE. Pull out your chips (to be safe) and check your connections again. You may have a short somewhere or a part inserted wrong. Are you using Smash's SID board as well? How are you supplying power to the SID? As for CORE, it sounds like that part is working - CORE always sends out a SysEx on start-up. Once you get the power stuff fixed with the SID board, instead of uploading the full application, start by uploading the SID testtone application. That should test basic functionality. Once that works, then go for the full blown app. DO NOT do this until you get proper voltages from everything though. I recommend you have a look at: http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp_sid.html Make sure all those tests pass (at the bottom of the page) before you start stuffing chips. Good luck!

Very nice indeed! That's quite a mixer too!

Awesome! That last one is basically exactly what I need. Looks like I'll have to wait for the next bulk order, but otherwise it should do nicely! Thanks for the info!

I lost my patch on my M-Audio Axiom 49, but I was able to get things working with it and the MBSID via NRPN. From what I can tell, you have a coarse control and fine control but you can't map them both to the same knob/slider (at least I couldn't). So I just used the coarse setting for most things. In fact, I don't think I ever got the fine control stuff working. From what I remember, you have to configure a different LSB/MSB to select between coarse and fine. Or something like that ;) It took me a few hours to figure it out the first time, and most of that was trying to figure out how to setup the Axiom, not the SID. Novation sells some awesome controllers, so I'm sure you can make it all work. I'd recommend scouring your manual to see if it can offer some insight. The MBSID implementation chart helps too (particularly the first couple of paragraphs that describes how all this works and, most important, the easy to use short-cuts for figuring our MSB/LSB values). All that said, TK was kind enough to bring back CC events to MB-SID (http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12774.0.html) so you could use that, grant, with a loss of precision for some things. Hope that helps! Good luck and let us know if you all get this working (and maybe share your work :). I plan on posting my patch for my Axiom 49 once I get around to redoing it.

After doing a bit more digging, it looks like there is quite a bit of information on the forums about how to do this, so yeah, it seems like it might be a good option. It seems a bit expensive though? I can get a 16 channel light controller from D-Light for $121 which lets me control 16 strands of lights. It's actually PIC-based, so I probably could figure out how they have everything hooked up and try to use a modified MIOS-based PIC, though that seems like it might be more trouble than it's worth. Point is, $121 and I'm basically done :) I looked around for basically what goes on the other side of the XLR cable and found some DMX relays. They seemed more expensive than I thought it would be though ($100-200 for an 8-channel), or am I missing something here? Here's some of what I did find: http://www.lanbox.com/products/LCXDataSheet.html http://djshop.com/dmx24.html http://www.bpesolutions.com/dmxproduct.html The first one might be helpful for people further than myself that might be building it with CORE. It's a one-stop solution and appears to convert MIDI to DMX for you.

:) Walked into that one I guess hehe :)

I second that (both the inability to enlarge the images AND the suggestion to use existing boards). You can also make a smaller board later, once you have everything working. That way you have also had time to work out the bugs and figure out how things work on a deeper level before jumping into a printed board. That, and boards can be expensive, though they are fun to design I'll give you that one!

Ah the demoscene...*drifts away in thought*. You know it's still around right? Not as amazing as the Future Crew days perhaps but it's still alive and kicking.

I don't suppose you might be willing to share the code? Your setup is very close to what I was thinking about doing, except I was thinking about more fine grained control using MIDI - notes and CC's instead of channels, which should offer plenty of combinations. You could then extend it using CC events to, say, control fade, strobe, etc. Also, does your approach allow for fading? That seemed like that might be possible, but I wasn't sure how well that would work using the DOUT board. Looks really awesome, by the way! I *really* like the idea of using MIDI to control lights. As a musician, that means I could easily write my own Christmas and Holiday mixes and easily convert them into MIDI to control lights. Heck, you could even "play" the lights in realtime :)

Helps to search for the right things eh? I tried searching before posting this but failed miserably :) Here's some links for good information: http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12738.0.html http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12442.0.html http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12433.0.html BAM! That first one seems close enough to what I want to do, except doing fades can't be done using DOUT but a good start nonetheless and seems fairly simple to do as well.

Wow this is all good stuff! I know that the D-Light stuff is planning on DMX support themselves, but it seems like, once built, this thing would be super easy to use for lights. I'll have to look at going it the DMX way as well. As for converting protocols, I could convert between MIDI and D-Light too (their protocol isn't open, but is easy to reverse engineer apparently). I guess it depends on which one is easier to implement and/or cheaper :) Being able to control lights via MIDI is an exciting idea though and would hopefully get me into finally remixing Carol of the Bells (my favorite holiday tune). I'm going to have to spend some time digesting all this stuff but this shows some good promise!

One of the things on my to-do list is to, at some point, setup one of those Christmas/Holiday light setups that are orchestrated to music (ie ). There's already stuff out there to do this fairly easily, but the problem is that, at least the ones I have seen, are not very music friendly - you have to manually take a WAV file and choreograph your lights to that. That seems ugly and complex. Seems to me that MIDI might be a great answer to this, at least in situations where the music itself was already in MIDI, or at least being timed via a real sequencer. For songs I create myself, this would be awesome, since all my timings are already available to me and the whole thing is already sequenced perfectly. The mapping would be fairly easy to do too - MIDI channels could be devoted to light strands or groups or an entire control box. Each note could also correspond to a light strand, and velocity, after-touch, etc. could be used to modulate the light in various ways (brightness, twinkle, etc.). Heck that means you could even "play" your lights via a MIDI keyboard. Seems like the MIOS platform should also make this reasonably easy to do, minus figuring out how to actually control the lights themselves (hence trying to figure out I'm a long way off from figuring out the specifics, such as if existing equipment can be used (such as the D-Light boards) or if a new solution needs to be designed. On top of that, I already need to finish my MB-SID and then start on my MB-64 mixer. So I may not be able to get to this by this year, but seems like a good idea. Has anyone else tried this before?

Hahah wow yeah it looks like it's almost done :) Probably just as well. ARM is likely more powerful than the Propeller stuff and having an a mature platform that works with GNU Tools is a pretty big deal. According to the link, it seems like it won't be that much more expensive either, which is nice! Only thing that I don't like is the SMD stuff. I jones for sockets :) Looks really promising though! You can bet I'll be grabbing one of these up once they are on SmashTV's shop!

Woo! Moving to an ARM platform? That sounds exciting! I assume with that much power you could consolidate all those PICs into one single controller? Also, I'm not sure how far along you may be, but have you looked into the Parallax Propeller stuff? It's 32-bit, RISC-based, and has a multi-core "Cog" system. You can dedicate one or more Cogs to a specific task (such as controlling a SID, handling the control-surface, etc.). It's also quite fast from what I understand, though I forget the MIPS rating specifically. Some guys at my local hardware meet-up have used it and have said some really good things about it, although I haven't had an excuse to use one myself yet.

So not much is new but I thought I'd let everyone know that I got the necessary parts in the mail! I haven't sent the board to BatchPCB yet (I'm trying to get a few boards ordered at the same time so save a bit on the processing fees) but I plan to soon. The 6800uF caps were a bit bigger than I thought they would be, but still small enough to fit in a smaller enclosure (2U should be fine, I think). I can post up the full parts list if anyone is curious, although all my parts were ordered from Allied Electronics (I don't have the part #'s for Mouser). I'll likely bust out a Wiki page after all is said and done too (assuming all this works :P)

It's not smaller (yet, anyway), but easier to work with. Or at least that's the plan: http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12695.60.html

Uhh..., are you feeding the 5V regulator with 5V? I assume you removed your regulators if your PSU is supplying 5VDC? I'm in the "don't use a switched power supply" camp (I'm in the "I'm building my own damn PSU" camp :) ), but I was forced into using one when I was trying to figure out how to power my first CORE + SID. I just grabbed one that was rated above what I needed to feed my regulators (I think I used 12VDC) and it worked ok. I still wouldn't advise that but *shrug* if it works for you :)

So I finally had a chance to replace the caps - 4 total. 1 was the 2200uF cap in the power section and the other 3 were on the main-board. When I pulled out the 2200uF cap, I was able to spot some additional electrolytics, but I can't get to them without figuring out how to take off the top shield of the power section (which is soldered to the mainboard). That said, after replacing the caps I did, there was a marked improvement. The wavy lines didn't truly go away until I cleaned the 72 pin connector and associated header on the mainboard (along with cleaning the cartridge itself). It is likely that simply cleaning it might've fixed all my problems :) I opted to try switching caps this time since the last time I cleaned it, the problem didn't seem to go away. Anyways, the Nintendo is working almost like new now, woot!