Thoughts of building the midibox seq3 is making me sick!!! Help!!!

[guitarsshop]

Alright after seeing what the midibox seq can do I really want one. the live control is exactly what i need.

But it looks very scary to build. I have minimal experiance building circuts and no experiance programing chips

Basicly I have wired guitars, soldered some lose connections and made repairs and i have built a few oscilators on breadboards

I know how to solder and I can kind of read schematics (and I mean KIND OF!!!) but that is pretty much it.

I know I am in way over my head but I really want a midibox seq... I can work hard at it but I have minimal experiance. I thought about getting dopfer sequencer maq16/3 but this midibox looks much better.

I will order all the kits so i think i can get the parts. but those boards looks so small to solder on. I am afraid i will mess up on those tiny boards and destroy them and be out my money without my new midibox.

really all i have is a soldering iron from radioshack. Basicly what problems will I run into and how long will this take and will i succed in creating this awsome sequencer.

Thanks to all for the help

[Wilba]

If you can wait a few more weeks (months?) for Doug to get ready to make/sell cases, perhaps this one-PCB design will help you:

http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,11802.0.html

[stryd_one]

Welcome aboard dude.

I know I am in way over my head

I think you have 10 times the experience of many who've gone before you... My guess is that your biggest issue will be fear. Jump in, the electrons are fine.

[stuartm]

You have more experience than I had when I started building my SeqV3, and I made it!

You have to invest some time, sure,

but all the documentation here is very, very detailed and clear.

I made my SeqV3 without ever contacting the forums or alike (acutally, in my very first post I presented my nearly finished box).

A good way to start would be to use the premade stuff from Smash / Mike's, which I also did,

or look for one of the group buys or the thread Wilba posted.

Oh and by the way, it took me about 9 months to convince myself to "I can do this - I need this".

Wish I did that earlier  :D

[creatorlars]

I'll second everyone's replies... I knew nothing when I made the decision to do this, and while it took way more work and time and debugging than I ever could have imagined, I finished mine in about 3 months.  It just comes down to how stubborn you are.  (After buying all the parts, I was pretty stubborn.)

My SEQ is now the central item in my rig now, though -- it is an incredible controller. 

[ultra]

to minimize wiring from board to board, and to match wilba's kit, you can order my pcb.

check this thread http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php/topic,12811.0.html

the second post has a link to the information about the pcb, and the first post links to the wiki to order it.

basically, this will keep you from having to connect the banksticks and IIC modules to a core with additonal pcbs and wiring.  if you don't need the IIC modules (extra MIDI I/O), you probably don't need this board and would be better off getting just a bankstick board and the rest of the stuff.

ultra

[Echopraxia]

Usually just having the right tools helps alot. Get a good thin solder (not thick like for audio cables) a good wire stripper, some cheap ribbon cable, idc connectors for the cable connections, some plastic/metal pcb to case mounting columns and a multi meter. I am sure I am forgetting something. If you have already soldered oscilators you can totally do this. I didn't know jack and it took me alot of reading and preping. I finished the pcbs but the panel becomes a design issue and thats where I started to lag because of how many times I thought about how I would case this thing. Now after taking so long I will have din, dout,core and iic boards that will need to go in something else because everybody here fraking kicks ass. I second the idea of waiting for the all in one solution from Wilba, Doug and Ultra. It would be the least path of resistance. But read up in the meantime and maybe buy some cheap pcb kit just to get some experience with soldering resistors ect.. but like I said if you have done oscillator before this probably won't be nessecary.

Regards echo