Hawkeye

while the new one sure haz hot specs i am a real fan of those old tube based ones :) mine has only got 20mhz but that is ok... around 50 bucks or sometimes for free from those people upgrading to the new tft based units :)

Hehehe, true :) (both were cheap, you can build a lab psu on your own for a few bucks, there are lots of schems out there). A cheap second-hand electron tube osc is really something. Not that I use it a lot, but it can be handy for attracting cats :)

Tested the crowbar-circuit (the retro-donald-psu one) with a voltage-adjustable lab PSU... after successful test, connected the Vreg outputs to the location where i had attached the lab PSU for testing... Many greets, Peter

Hi Paul, It may be safer to PM/mail Tim/SmashTV about that order change, cause sometimes it may get lost in the forumz ... Ordered a CS PCB for a portable SEQV4, today, too :frantics:, can´t wait to use it with the MIDIfied piano :) Many greets, Peter

Which C64 revision had the SIDs soldered in? Extreme cost-saving by Commodore, again... Only beaten by their PSU design :) PS: Desoldering a SID with a butane blowtorch with your wife without damaging it... that is really something ;-)

of course it is already operational :) only the best filtered, clean, safer power juice for the SIDs :) The avalanches sound interesting, too :)

yupp, i think i can remember testing it and it being triggered just below 6v... so you think the SIDs would survive that for a short time? :nuke:

Me findz it very hard to believe, that there aren´t any modern linear vregs with built-in output protection?!? Have got the zener triggered crowbar in my mb6582 psu, too, but as you say, the trigger voltage may be already a bit high... which logic voltage is considered fatal for SIDs? Many greets, Peter

Having built a polivoks filter and being confronted with the same problem, I realized that there is a tradeoff between tight instrument (patch engine) integration vs reusability for other synths, if you don´t want to patch many cables around... Fortunately, the polivoks filter has dedicated pots for manual cut/res control (which serve as an offset when using control voltage inputs), so i´ve decided to connect it to the MBSEQ AOUT later on, which allows for recording and sequencer automation, and using the filter via the audio mixer fx send/return channels to enable it for all synths... but obviously this disables the benefits of filter control by the synth engine, which is very powerful in both MBFM and MBSID... It was a hard choice, because I´ve really enjoyed TKs fine demos of the FM engine in conjunction with directly coupled filters! So, you have to decide for yourself what you need, a possibility would be to use an external MIDI controller/sequencer to manually change cutoff and resonance values, send these changes via MIDI to the MBFM, which will control the "potentiometerless" filter for you, but I don´t know how these CCs are internally "mixed together" with the filter changes generated by the internal patch engine. Many greets, Peter

Very nice, go for it then, I will support you as good as I can with the 16x8 TPD code :) Just out of pure interest - how much will the panel be with the current Ponoko rebates, approximately? Many greets, Peter

zwar nicht ganz Deine gewünschte Zielgrösse, aber mit 12x13mm nah dran und bezahlbar - Alps STEC 12E mit (STEC12E08) oder ohne (STEC12E07) Push-Funktion, 1.50€ oder 1.90€ bei Reichelt, funktionieren bei mir im SEQv4 auch nach fast täglichem Gebrauch nach 1.5 Jahren noch sehr gut :) Viel kleiner macht in meinen Augen auch gar keinen Sinn, weil Du ja noch die Finger dazwischenkriegen musst - hab die Reichelt 10mm Encoder-Kappen und die sind prima für enge Abstände ;-). Ciao und viele Grüße, Peter

Hi ilmenator, Had to reduce it to 8x8, because i was out of DOUT pins and the MBSEQ enclosure was totally filled up with PCBs (3x DOUT/3x DIN, 4x IIC, Core32 and AoutNG (not installed yet) in a single old Commodore 1541-II case :). Also, I thought that people wanting to replicate it, might only want to use one DOUTx4 for additional bling - BPM indicator (4 digits) + Step counter (3 digits) = 7 + 8 DOUT pins and the 8 + 8 DOUT pins for the 8x8 matrix fit nicely (31 pins used). Also, the four position LEDs per track are normally enough, it is just a bling indicator to show which tracks are unmuted and when they will turn around back to step "1"... But, really important non-bling is the step counter, it really helps a lot when recording, or for precisely timed unmutes/mutes... The track position display should be fairly easily extendable from 8x8 to a 16x8 matrix, the code is quite simple, and one could make it "switchable" in the configuration, if TK. gives the "go". Regarding the BLM question - i asked, because I did not investigate that hardware option for the MBSEQv4 yet - i knew it was an option the SEQ V3, but did not know that it was still supported... For a drum setup, this is very nice, because you can see the full pattern drum triggers at a glance, but aren´t 16 buttons and LEDs redundant then? Because one track will always be the active one of the current group/pattern and that is already shown/duplicated beneath the 40x2 displays... don´t want to distract you from the idea - the frontpanel looks very nice as you designed it! Many greets, Peter

Very nice! I like it a lot! Thanks for adding the track position display + step display, can´t wait to see a video of this shiny SEQ :) Regarding the two free up/down buttons - it depends a lot on your workflow and i can´t say too much about it here, as I don´t use the standard Wilba frontpanel layout, but there are a few new noteworthy functions, which can be assigned to a single button, best to experiment a little before ordering the frontpanel... For my part, i would love to have a dedicated "scroll button" (which is in utility-scroll), because i use that a lot. I also have dedicated "loop" and "follow" buttons, which are used quite often (but which are maybe put on the F1...F4 buttons by default, don´t know :-)). Also, my personal thought is, that FAST is not necessary, if you have pushable encoders, which improves the feeling a lot, it just makes sense to "press to accellerate" ;-) Regarding dual button linking, I use two "edit" buttons... they are just connected together in parallel, so that an event is triggered, if either button is depressed, I don´t think it is yet possible to configure this in software yet... Regarding the mini-BLM - does it display the track triggers of the currently active group? Please check the wiring for the BPM/Step display digits on breadbooard before creating/ordering a PCB, there was some pin-assignment confusion some time ago and I am not sure, that the documentation is correct. Many greets and have lots of fun with this thing! ;-) Peter

@wicked1: the LM2940 is a bit more expensive, harder to obtain and not as known as the 78XX... It has stricter requirements regarding the output capacitor (should be low-esr), otherwise it is an improved model, which helps save energy as you do not need so high input voltage that needs to be burned. @NorthernLightX: 54KHz switching still may be a little bit low, for those people analyzing their 96khz samples in 1:1 mode - don´t wanna fuel the holy switcher/linear war here :) Many greets, Peter

The core module has the T1 (BC337) and a trimmer, which can be used to control the current flow through the backlight, so nothing too bad will probably happen. But ytsestefs idea of trying with a single LED is a good idea to test with a cheap part. Greets, Peter

If you have four of them lying around, you could try schottky diodes instead of a standard bridge rectifier... then there would be less voltage drop there... and additionally use a low-voltage drop regulator like the LM2940, which will also only need about 12.5V to regulate to a stable 12V/1A... it might be cheaper than a new transformer... but this is all patchwork... so +1 on Shuriken´s words! Many greets, Peter

Hey there, yes, speaking German :) Bitshifting just means, the bits are shifted to the left or right, and zeroes are added on the other end, in binary form on an 8-bit datatype: 11110011 << 2 = 11001100 On many cpus there also exist instructions to rotate, inserting the bits that fall off one end of the value at the other end. So a "trick" to throw the upper three bits of any datatype away, would be to shift left by three, then shift right by three. But this is not necessarily the most efficient way to do it, that would most probably be by ANDing with 00011111 :) Many greets, Peter

Hi, the operations perfomed are 0x41 is left shifted by three bits (aka multiply by eight), resulting in a value of 0x208 it is then ANDed with 0x38, resulting in a value of 0x08 this is then ORed with 0x03, resulting in a value of 0x0B Hope it helps :) Bye, Peter

Research note, to anyone interested in these delays :) As for now, you can still get MN3008 bucket brigade delay chips with half the delay time as the MN3005s from trustworthy sources like smallbear electronics (jojjelito´s recommended link, thx again!). These can be converted into "full" 4096-stage "bucket brigades" by chaining two of these chips - the corresponding circuit is also published on that site. The other alternative are v3205 chips, which are new pseudo-clones by coolaudio and are available for about 1/3 of the price of two 2048-stage BBDs. But the v3205s are driven by 9V only, have less headroom - and in some delay designs seem to have problems with distorted delays. Here is a nice "old vs new bucket brigade delay" demo: As a conclusion, the cost for a "real" -15v analog DIY delay today is less than 100$, which I think is still great for its sound. The price will probably rise in the future, as the MN3008s may become quite rare, too... Many greets, Peter