Siempre La Luna

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:

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.

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.

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?

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.

TK really brought 'cool educational television theme song' vibe on that track.

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

Ask really nicely and Wilba might come up with one for you. I suspect he may have an extra or two stashed away. ;)

That's beautiful. Good work.

Glad you lie it. That's MIDI enabled Speak & Spell, Read, & Math. The yellow synth is an E-Mu XL-7 stuffed with a bunch of different ROMs sitting behind a MIDIfied SK-5. There's an E-MU E5000 in the rack under it. The tattoo says "Satan also has his miracles"

U no want cat, U want honeybadger: