Siempre La Luna
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Posts posted by Siempre La Luna
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Sale pending for the SID, FM is still available. So is the Shruthi if anyone is interested in that.
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If it's OK with TK and everyone else involved, I'd like to sell this sammichSID and sammichFM. I built them for my ex-gf (don't worry, we're still on good terms) and she's having some financial difficulties right now that neccessitate the sale.
Link to photo sets here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/siempre_la_luna/sets/72157626636797204/
and here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/siempre_la_luna/sets/72157625696361732/
She's also got a stock Shruthi-1 with an SMR-4 filterboard that she's looking to get rid of.
photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/siempre_la_luna/sets/72157626425605900/
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1. Complete the voltage tests for both boards
2. Disconnect power
3. Insert IC1, IC2L, IC3L, & IC3 into the Base PCB
4. Insert IC1, IC2, IC3, & IC4 into Control Surface PCB
5. Reassemble
6. Fire up MIOS Studio
7. Power on the sammich
8. Make sure MIOS and sammich are properly hollerin' at each other
9. Upload the latest sammichSID hex
10. Wait for the sammich to reboot
11. Make sure the fancy knob and buttons are behaving appropriately
12. Disconnect power
13. Insert Banksticks (IC6, IC7, IC8, IC9, IC10)
14. Power on the device
15. Watch in amazement as the banksticks are formatted
16. Load the default patches via MIOS Studio
17. Power down the sammich
18. Install your SIDs with the appropriate jumpers and capacitors
19. Power that MF'er up
20. Check for smoke/fire
21. Perform shredding tunes
22. Create killer patches
23. Record album
24. Get rich
25. Marry supermodel
26. Make more killer records
27. Grow weary of supermodel wife/husband
28. Make poorly executed and ill-advised break-up album
29. Alienate your former fans
30. Take a swing at a reporter that calls you a sell-out and a has-been
31. Retreat from public life
32. Return 6 years later with amazing new album and smoking hot collection of girlfriends/boyfriends
33. Die as a legend in your chosen genre atop a pile of cash
34. Be an icon for generations of musicians to come
I think that's it.
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Super creepy sounds!
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Yea, looks good. The white button caps are pretty sweet as well.
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I just built my sammichFM over the past weekend. Great project!
Looks great! Love that red on white.
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The backlight pot has zero effect both with and without JR4A. Contrast is set to max (or is it min?). So does the backlight pot do anything on yours?
I can confirm that the backlight pot has no effect on the display. Weird. I hadn't noticed that when I first assembled it. Mine is pretty bright though. Can you post a photo of yours? If we compare them we might be able to determine if yours is oddly dark, mine is oddly bright, or if they are the same and we just have different definitions of bright and dark.
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Damn! So close, so close...
BTW Did you get the blue Optrex recommended by Wilba (C-51505NFQJ-LB-AJN)? Mine is a little dimmer than I would like. The backlight pot has zero effect both with and without JR4A. Contrast is set to max (or is it min?). So does the backlight pot do anything on yours?
Thx,
C
Wilba hooked me up with that display so I don't have an order form or packing slip around that has the model number on it, but I think it's safe to assume they are the same. I don't recall mine being particularly responsive to changes on the dimmer control. I built that one for my girlfriend and it's now living in her studio on the other side of town so I can't check it out at the moment. The display being kind of dark compared to the LEDs was part of the reason why I painted the LEDs in the first place though. I'll check out the backlight pot this evening and let you know what I come up with.
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The Optrex display is really impressive, you're going to love it. Wilba & nILS did a good thing by making sure the pcb is set-up to accept both the optrex and standard displays. Hooray for that.
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FWIW I recently finished a sammichFM that followed Siempre's color scheme. I tried 3 different LEDs using the stock 220 resistor. One (Mouser 604-W934MBDK) had 25 mcd brightness and was perfect (I don't like super-bright LEDs). The other two were 700 mcd (Mouser 593-VAOL-3LSBY1) and 190 mcd (Mouser 859-LTL1CHCBK - end of life part so not recommended). The latter two were much too bright so I tried Siempre's painted-LED trick and it worked great. I just dipped each one right into the paint about 3-4 mm. The brightness was good with a single coat. In the end I went with the un-painted version since is was the most straightforward and I was worried the paint would make the LED too big for the hole.
So now the important question: do I still get to call my color scheme (arctic white case + blue LCD/LED) the "Siempre de la Luna Edition" without painted LEDs? :-)
Regards,
C
LOL. The Siempre La Luna Edition, awesome. It certainly has a nice ring to it. I like the look of it so much that I went back and blanked the LEDs on my sammichSID too. I hate to say it though, I think the blanked-out LEDs are the crucial bit of the SLL edition.
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Wink Wink
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@Siempre La Luna: I really like your design and already voted 5 stars for it :smile:. May I ask you for the LED brightness? I would like to use white-painted red-glowing LEDs in my sammichFM design, but I'm not sure how bright they should be. I consider using 100mcd ones.
Best
Martin
I'm glad you like it. The blue ones I used were 200mcd. Blue and white LEDs are way brighter than most red, green, or yellow LEDs so you might want something a bit brighter. I'm no expert though, so it's probably best to try a few different ones and see which gets the best results. Be sure to let us all know how it turns out. :)
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Painted LEDs! I think you just started something big.
I think so. It looks great and it's easy to do. I've got a gnarly week at work coming up, but I hope to get a chance to mess around with the idea a little more and see if I can come up with anything super cool.
Perhaps it's time to change the title of this topic to 'sammich behaving awesomely'
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The Optrex LCD is really impressive. The color is really rich and the black is quite dark. The LEDs are indeed opaque white. I'm always on the lookout for low brightness blue LEDs and I bought these under the impression that they were not at all bright. After I received them, I breadboarded a couple and and promptly learned that they were not at all low brightness. In fact, they were some of the brightest 3mm blue LEDs I've ever seen. In the end I decided to paint the tops of the LEDs white. I dipped them in some white enamel just to cover the domed part that covers protrudes from the sammich case. It really cuts the brightness while allowing the unpainted portion of the LED to illuminate the translucent panel around the LED. I'm really pleased with the way it turned out. The effect is really cool. I tried a few different colors of enamel to see how the effect differed. Black was too dark, blue looked uneven in the presence of varying paint thickness, but white was consistently great. This sammichFM is for my girlfriend so it was important to me that it look as good as it sounds She saw it last night and totally loved it.
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It was nice to take the time to sit down and have a close look at the circuit diagram, trace and test everything back from the output to the power supply, and look closely at every single connection on both sides of the board. When building something I'm usually in a hurry to get it finished or distracted by focusing cameras and recording video that I rarely take the time to be incredibly thorough about checking everything. I'm both amused and relieved that the problem was something obvious and simple obscured by unlikely circumstances. I found the process to be pretty relaxing... but not so relaxing that I'll ever do it again unless I absolutely have to.
Now, the shiny beautifulness of my girlfriend's new sammichFM:
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Cool. Funny I just had a similar breakthrough with my recently finished 9090... The Ride Cymbal wouldn't work, and I could NOT figure out where the problem was. I figured it was a transistor or an IC, not a short or bad solder joint (cause I never do either... :whistle: ) and when I looked at the Ride Cymbal section of the output board for the 10th time I found 1 pad was lifted and therefore breaking the signal path... Oh well, at least it works now!
Cheers,
Alex
Totally, I'm far too awesome and competent to ever do something as stupid as bridge a pair of pads. Never mind that fact that I did that twice here and had different reasons to not detect either one of them. It turns out that the distortion was due to a loose piece of solder bridging C62 on the top side of the board. So it goes. Everything is good now and sammichFM #2 is working perfectly. Thanks for the help everyone. I'm always stoked at how nice and helpful MIDIboxers are. I'll post some photos later.
Clearly, the lessons here are:
No matter how big the symptoms, the problem is probably something simple so go back and check it five or six more times.
sammichFM does not respond to threats no matter which MIDI channel they are sent on but, if enough people request it, that feature might be included in the next update.
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Since we're both in Portland (and its finally fucking sunny so I'm feeling generous :hug: ) I have 2 PICs that are confirmed working with the firmware installed. You can borrow one to test with if you'd like... PM me if that would help.
cheers,
grizz
Thanks Grizz. I think I'm all good on PICs at the moment. I pulled the PIC from the toxic waste green prototype sammichFM (which works great) and put it in the new sammich and it did the 'every third patch is the rhodes patch' thing again. That left me thinking it was a short or a mechanical thing that I somehow missed every time I looked at it. I opened it back up, replaced the suspect PIC, and started looking for shorts again. I eventually found one. This bit blew my mind. One of the resistors on the lower row of LEDs was shorted to the adjacent LED cathode. It didn't show up as shorted because one of the solder spots had a patch of flux where I kept touching the probe. I got the magnifiers out and saw a damn-near microscopic bit of solder bridging the pads. It looked like a reflection. I never would have seen it had I not been super paranoid. I cleaned it up and all the buttons and LEDs worked and the glut of rhodes patches had fixed itself. Totally weird. I guess it happens to all of us every once in a while.
Now I'm just trying to figure out the distortion on out 1/2 but after a 17 hour work day, I'm calling it a night.
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reload of MIOS and re-install of FM firmware did not work. I'm moving ahead with the threats. I'm going to hold a knife to its face for a few minutes, go to bed, and hope it's better tomorrow. Anyone have another idea?
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As you can see from the video, the LEDs are acting weird. I'm also getting a lot of distortion on output 1/2. I've checked for shorts everywhere that I thought might be the problem (and a few places in proximity to those bits) but I'm coming up empty. Anyone have suggestions for further troubleshooting?
Also of note, my laptop spazzed out when I was uploading the hex to the PIC causing the hex to not fully load resulting in some odd characters and weirdness on the sammich LCD. I reloaded the PIC without issue the second time around and everything appears to be cool but, also possibly related; When I loaded the patches to it, it seems to have made every third patch the Rhodes piano patch... which would be awesome if I really needed 50 identical rhodes patches but since I don't I'd like to fix that too.
Troubleshooting I've already done:
Checking for shorts
Looking for inappropriate voltages
regular voltage checks
Correct orientation of all polarized parts
visual inspection of solder joints
continuity tests
cussing
prayer
leave it alone for a few days and hope it gets better
At this point I'm willing to consider incantations, percussive maintenance, advanced cussing, and blood sacrifice as possible solutions but I'd like to get a few more opinions before I proceed with those.
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yo, cool background track! mbfm-powered? very nice!
TK really brought 'cool educational television theme song' vibe on that track.
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Btw: Nice video! And nice sammich of course!
Most fun video I've made to date.
Additional sammichFM Fun:
More Flickr photos here: sammichFM, terrible prog-rock cover here: Hocus Pocus, decent art-rock cover here: Red Rider
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This looks like a conspiracy to me! :frantics:
How did you sell 50 kits without announcing it here?
I only saw some pics of prototypes in the gallery, and some vague comments about it.
Where else could i have looked?
Ask really nicely and Wilba might come up with one for you. I suspect he may have an extra or two stashed away. ;)
[FS] sammichSID, sammichFM, & Shruthi-1
in Fleamarket
Posted · Edited by Siempre La Luna
They're all gone (except the SID which was likely damaged in transit or broken before it left her house. Who knows, still trying to figure that mess out. Either way. it's not available). Thanks everyone.