jojjelito

Elfa has the SSM so I can walk there... Joking aside, Banzaieffects, Small Bear and Bridechamber all carry some of these. The SSM is compatible with THAT1646 or INA137. But, it seems you're stuck with Farnell, Mouser and perhaps Digikey amongst the bigger companies. RS/Allied only seem to carry some SSM's.

Mmm, otherwise I know some hungry (traditional) Koreans in case the lab loses interest... He looks yummy enough for some Bulgogi :drool: ! BTW, the kitteh eated my protoboard, oh noes! Now, after the fun and games with the Core32 and the MB-seq v4 today, which did work on first attempt - yay, it's time for teabagging some noobs in BFBC2 (Schlachtfeld, schlechte Gesellschaft zwei) methinks :ninja: Happy Easter!

Erm, today's date is? :D I'm sure my revolutionary drum oscillator has evaporated in a cloud of magic smoke by the 2nd of April. However, now that it almost did sound feasible I might axshually make something up later. Sound samples and all... :whistle: Toodles!

Hi all, I was recently perusing a few old drum oscillator circuits in order to figure out a radical modification to my TR-9090. I came across a good explanation of how the classic twin-T oscillator works at PAIA. I wanted to make it down with the kids these days, so this variant of the twin-T is now the Teabagging oscillator. By adding a simple comparator that checks the CV level at R3 in the PAIA schematic we can tweak gliss behaviour over time. Thus, when the CV voltage has died sufficiently we can humiliate the circuit by adding fresh voltage through the comparator. This, leads to the drum sound being manipulated in novel and interesting ways. Schematics might follow at a later date. If you are nice I might even produce tiny PCBs with Ponoko-made boxes for all the cool kids. Cheers y'all! :sorcerer:

Hi Julian, all, I was very happy as I got the last panel from the previous batch. It looked very nice, so I spent yesterday evening mounting it to the PCB. The craftsmanship is very good and it fits like a glove. I'd like to order another one since I'm building a 2nd MBSeq. Green infill this time :) Cheers!

PM Sent! I'll take the other plus some extra bits and bobs. Monday the 8th of March: I received my panel from the friendly postman this morning! So, I spent the evening glueing on standoffs and fixing the PCB to the panel. It was dead easy and looked the business. The craftsmanship of the cut panel was second to none. Big thanks to Julian! /J

Got my parts today! I am thrilled almost to the point of having withdrawal symptoms from my soldering station. Wilba's PCB looks like it will almost self-assemble. I sense wicked design skills. Big thanks to Fussylizard and Wilba! Not to forget TK as I'll soon experience the software.

Mine came to the sunny and cold Stockholm today. They sure look scrumptious and just beg to be put to good use. Thanks Uli!

Haha, this would be way OT, but sometimes you gotta pay respect to the Elvis shrine. Plus, we must all get our obligatory "Keep Austin weird" T-shirts from somewhere... Now back to Mountain Dew, Aout and SSM-based good unclean fun. Enjoy the festival!

LCDs arrived yesterday. That was very fast coming all the way from the Live Music Capital of the World, Tx! Picked them up sans customs or suchas this very fine day in sunny Stockholm. Nicely done Chris! Go grab something at Chuy's because you pulled it off 8)

Weird this. There I was, somewhat puzzled by the lack of any announcement, seeing Smash's Core32-page. Maybe I should a) Wait for Smashy b) Organize something for folks from my own country (Sweden) c) Be patient... Anywho, shipping is the proverbial purse of pain (bag o' hurt) and there's nothing Smash can do about it that hasn't been tried or discussed I think. The whole AVI Showtech service is very good so maybe we are not that worse off left to our own devices? Back to holding pattern until the tower says ready.

I'd be in for 2x PCBs 2x Kits please. Thanks for putting this together BTW. Going to order these in conjunction w/ some other gear from Smash.

5 for me, please. I should deffo make myself a seq plus get on with the FM beastie...

I added myself as I started to solder the passives to my MB6582 baseboard. It's been tempting me for a while but it's summer outside for once so things take time. Got the emergency number in case I feel like being into numerology. Is it perhaps an omen ???

Now this is the life. Imagine marrying the sequencer board and the 9090 voice boards in a nice-looking table-top case. Say hi to your own, fully serviceable MB9090. Now bring me some beer to go with this tasty Gumbo :P

Hi again Artesia! I've been looking into this a bit more but my coding skills are rusty to put it nicely. However, I tried to fill in the blanks on the CEM by looking at the schematics of the previous art. Next up is to forge ahead with block diagrams and then pencil in some solutions. How to get to an MB3396: Voice card hardware (your very nice board). Rudimentary timing system with rough tuning accuracy, can be done with the Core i/o or PWM. Multiplexed control using data distribution and S/H circuitry. The ghetto method (4051s plus caps) can be employed if we can guarantee fast updates. Improved timing, possibly with range switching of the waveform converter. See below. Improved S&H as in the Xpander service manual (small and large steps, smoothing etc). Waveform trimming. See below. Sync mode logic lifted from the Oberheim schemos. Other autotuning for the DCOs (is this needed?) and the VCF frequency/tracking etc. The lite/lab version of the software needs to grow as the above goals are reached. 3396 timing and range: There are quite a few things to realize around the 3396 chips for this to be viable. It was observed in the thread http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,7466.0.html that the DCOs are best driven using dedicated timer chips (8253/8254) or with a beefier MCU. Also, the data-sheet gives away that active correction is needed for the waveform converter in order to reach more than 6 octaves of range. I was looking at the Cheetah MS6 schematics available at: http://www.butoba.net/homepage/MS6-schem.pdf as well as the Matrix-6/6r schematic at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matrixsynth/sets/72157607736211309/ in order to see how that may be done. It turns out that I can't really see the range trick implemented since not all ICs can be identified in any event. However, the reasoning behind this is given in the CEM3396 PDF pp.7-8 and a solution lies in the last barely legible page. It seems that the other schematics source at Oberheim Heaven contains corrupt files. Better Matrix-6 scans would be helpful. Waveform trimming: Also, there is talk about using the processor and successive approximation to trim for the correct waveshape in the CEM PDF. The processor can measure the triangle wave output using an SR flip-flop to detect glitches. I see some circuitry for this in the last page of the data-sheet as well as the circuitry for the [tt]PULSE[/tt] signal visible in the Matrix-6 schematics. I am going to try to study these schematics in order to decipher which chips have been used for some reverse engineering. I hope someone else can also gleam something from this. Your board can be tapped for the CEM3396 output and the waveshape circuitry can be placed off-board. Range switching seems trickier to place but can be omitted at first in any case. Then there's the software :) Suppose that a slave PIC has to update the various CVs at the 4051s if we copy that method. This means that the MIOS node (Core) processes MIDI, takes care of GUI-related tasks, patch mgmt etc and then updates various registers in the slave. Also, someone (the MIOS node?) needs to update the timer if an external timer IC is used. Or we wait for the new Core32 to do all of this. I smell periodic tasks so this won't be a walk in the park. Moving on to loftier software goals: It would be really nice to be able to read/convert Matrix-6/6r/1000 as well as MS6r patches whilst observing parameter differences such as lin/log envelopes plus mono/bi/multitimbral settings. This is totally over the top and best done using a proper computer. There it is... the road ahead to the old, much talked about MB3396 in some form. This is usually how far it gets it seems. It needs takers and doers. I can at least try to fill in the gaps for the 3396 chip (any help is welcome). Over to our OP Artesia.

Got em today to my evil Sundbyberg/Stockholm HQ. Thanks Wilba! Now if only the evil little bugger in my avatar would stop hitting me with a hammer ???

No worries. You're correct of course: it's easy to add an alternative solution to replace the 4051/53 combo. The DG408 ferinstance is of course not pin compatible with the 4051 as that would make life less interesting. When I built my old multimode I used an ADC, pot and jack combo for the mode select :) It was awsomeness in a very small box 8) but might not be for everyone. I suspect that RX27 needs to be changed as the signal at cell4/Cd is probably 70 times weaker than that of Ca-Cc. This can be inferred via pouring over and comparing with the 3379 PDF. This is not a problem per se for the Xpander/Matrix 12 since those use the externally available VCF out which is larger in amplitude. Anywho, if need be that's a real quick change which doesn't affect the PCB. Now, I need to start looking at the 4 odd CEM 3396s as well as the copy of the Cheetah MS-6 service manual I got with a couple of them courtesy of Ebay. Damnit, this fall/autumn will be busy if it starts depleting my check later stash :o As for nice extras: if you add the frosting on top you could end up with realtime filter mode changes as well as continuously variable waveshapes thanks to PWM and modulating the waveform slope. The M1000 could only do modulation via LFOs as it was never to big on NRPNs or controllers. Almost drool-worthy and very analog sounding.

Sweet deal! The thing is that the old 405x chips produce plopping sounds when switched. They are not ideal if any realtime switching is going on. It's been observed by Marc Bareille that the DG40x chips are more silent. He made this board: http://m.bareille.free.fr/modular1/vcf_multimode/extrapole.htm which is also based on the xpander filter. I would suggest a component change if you want to go "analog Wavestation" with this, but the DGs cost a fair bit. Earlier on there was a thread about using CEM filters in Design Concepts where I went through some of the intricate bits involved in the VCF CV in order to help a poster who was looking at making a vcf board. Earlier I was experimenting with the CEM3379 thinking that it too could be xpandified. Turns out it can, but it doesn't have this constant volume/bandwidth trickery that the CEM3372 has, so the VCF output drops a lot with increasing resonance. I might be useful to try out the CEM3396 for this as well before getting high hopes, but the datasheet for the 3396 mentions this and it looks more similar to the 3372 in topology than the 3379 so with some luck it this feasible with a good/useful result. Now, it's too bad I don't have a Matrix 1000 in some closet :) There's only some 3396 chips in a drawer and my wish to blow some life into a potential MB-3396 along the lines of the old user project floating around but based on the new core.

A couple of white PCBs (maybe it's cupcake frosting?) did arrive in mah mailbox. To think they came all the way from Dresden, beautiful city of the Frauenkirche conveniently located between Berlin and Prague to little old me... Das is echt geil! Thank you! 8)

Got me some SSM chips delivered to home whilst on x-mas break. They came all the way from Wilba in Oz in next to no time. Beautiful work mate! 8) Wish there was a Santa smiley or sumthing...

Got mine earlier this week! Thanks TK!

Got mah boards today 8) Big thanks to Seppoman! Time to count a few sheep and dream about soldering.

I wrote in the http://www.midibox.org/dokuwiki/where_to_order_components where you can go in general. Labb Elektronik mentioned earlier is now gone, Bhiab has some of their old stock, for instance lots of different (even rare) transistors. Trimlog is also gone, BTW. Also, JEC has most of the supposedly rare stuff if you are thinking 303-clones (you know which ones I mean :-X) or x0x-stylee drum machines. I can also recommend http://www.electrokit.se/ for various bits and bobs.

What about the options? Leopard skin, camo, fuzzy hair, and ohh - power everything plus AM/FM Casette?