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MB808 from the begining, sources of info


sbm

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Hi Everyone

 

For several months now I have been considering building my own MB808, but the information out there is quite scattered.

 

I know about the eight-oh-eight website, and have seen some of the schematics.  Are these all accurate and corrected?  Aside from what's on the site, it seems the project there is defunct.

 

I also know about the midiseq standalone components, so I could get the DOUT, etc to build the sequencer parts, and build the voice boards separately.  That's here:  http://ucapps.de/midibox_808.html

 

That brings me to this:  http://xlargex.xl.funpic.de/.  It looks like this and the midiseq can be married from what I have read.  Would this be the right way to go now?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

Bill

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If you want a MB808 anytime soon, the scenario you describe is the best one. I recently had the voice board made for me. Haven't started building yet tho. But if you use the search option you will find enough info how to link sequencer to the voiceboards.

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Required parts for MB808:

 

Documents how to link the stuff:

 

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Hi guys

 

Wow, thanks for the answers, they are all really very helpful.  Lot's of good information here and in the links you provided.  The German language site has very good coverage for the circuits as well, thanks for that.

 

I know about the demise of the forum, which is really a tragedy.  I got to the point that I even used the Internet Archive's Wayback machine to see if I could access the postings....all they had in the captures were the tantalizing topic thread titles but clicking on any of them revealed those were never captured for some reason.  So sad.  Well, time to start looking for parts before they become obsolete or too late to reproduce.

 

I have almost all the parts for the stand-alone version, except the rotary encoder.  Would the one that SmashTV sells do the job?

 

Thanks Again!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hi guys,

 

Just thought that for the record, I should share some tidbits in case there is anyone else pursuing the same obsession.

 

Tayda Electronics is a good source for some rarer parts like the 2SC945 at http://www.taydaelectronics.com, plus http://www.banzaimusic.com/ and http://www.dalbani.co.uk/ too. Vintage Planet has parts according to manufacturer too: http://www.vintageplanet.nl.  But both Eric Archer (http://ericarcher.net/devices/tr808-clone/) and Dirk Lindhof (mentioned above, http://musiksynthesizer.de/DL-808.htm) suggest good alternatives to try.

 

The eight-oh-eight.org forum is no longer active, but pieces of it can be retrieved from the Internet Archive's wayback machine, located through the following URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20100110053327/http://www.eight-oh-eight.org/, especially the original parts BOM that can be used as a starting point to update.. It takes a good deal of clicking around through the various captures but some hints are still discernible.

 

And of course there is the original xlarge site http://xlargex.xl.funpic.de/ that inspired it all.

 

Thanks!

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Hi,

 

The some Eagle files from the eight-oh-eight.org forum, i think.

 

Regards,

Janis

 

attachicon.gif808_production_Individual_Files.rar                              

 

Oh wow that's amazing thank you.

 

In the Internet Archive, a discussion can be found about these files, but the links are all dead - you're better than the Internet Archive! :smile:

 

So from what I see these are the individual files for each part of the circuit, also how it traces on each region of the board.  Does anyone know how these files can be combined, or if they can be combined into one board?

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  • 11 months later...

Hi everyone

 

I want to thank you all for your input last year.  I finally got this project started, and am part way.  It's taken a long time to get materials and do the research, but looks like it is progressing well.  I'll post to a separate thread for those who are interested.

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Hi guys

 

SO here is the long and the short of it:

 

I spent many hours reading through everything last summer, again picking up things this summer.  I noted that there was Moogah's cool version since taken over by Doug Wellington (https://www.eight-oh-eitght.org/, now defunct).  Thanks to a posting above, I found the Eagle PCB masks for each section of the project, but no knowledge on how to merge all the masks/layers together, so I didn't spend much time on it.  I also had to think about what I read of the old 808 forum through the Internet Archive, which had some postings above board errors and such, but not much else on what those errors were, which sealed the fate of that part of it:  I wouldn't be using that as the basis for the build.  The only thing potentially salvageable from that mess was the parts list, so I simply confirmed I had most of the resisters and capacitors, plus at least some of the seqv3 boards and DINS and DOUTS to roll it that way (thanks to Shuriken's post above). Warning:  Don't follow the Doug Wellignton list that was once there strictly:  I was told that the design changed, so it's still good as a guide, but that's all.

 

Another posting above (zephyrin's) to Christian Hartwig's version gave me much encouragement, so by this spring I had better confidence that the PCBs for both the power and the tr-0806 (http://www.christian-hartig.de/TR-8060/) would work.  (Thanks to Christian for releasing those).  So now I had the MIDI part as well as well as voices part.  He also released a parts list + sources and it's pretty complete I have to say.  I took the board files, had them produced and I am impressed.  I only found 2 mistakes on the main board as I remember (missing parts values) so what a job to do it oneself, well done.  Another thing I did find was the tolerances on the board were tight, so the parts in the list seemed to be several microns to big (connectors in particular) for many spaces on the board.

 

I then contacted TK's front panel supplier to order what turns out to be the last one he'll make since he says it's pretty hard to do these days.  Managed to get that, plus I picked up a Hammond case similar to SeakThief's since I thought it would make a good chassis for the whole thing.

 

The last several weeks have been just a lot of work soldering with breaks to do some drilling here and there.

 

More later!

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  • 2 months later...

Just to let everyone know I am still progressing :)

 

The hardest and most time consuming part (besides work and life in general) has been machining the panel.

 

In other news, I have plenty of photos of the build, but not yet found a way to upload to the gallery; the power supply circuit seems not to work, it might be a bad lot of parts, so I need to create a different power supply for the main board; I see that Christian Hartig has taken the site down as he's no longer working on the project. I that makes it one of the last TR-808 clone builds left.  Hopefully it's not because it turns ut the board design had problems. :-/.

 

Onwards and upwards!

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I am also building a module

Based on original schematics from TR-808 with extra mods
I ll post only my demo case
It is not the final version..
There will be heavy mods on it

 

I wanna use a DOG Display like MB9090
Any documents on how to connect it??

 

dPI9rQ.png

Edited by Navicat
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A DOG display will require some special initialisation code in the firmware which is not supported by default...

 

However, I would propose to use an OLED instead, it looks much better and doesn't required SW changes!

 

Here some pictures from our (upcoming) MIDIbox DR (based on MIDIbox 808 firmware)

 

mbdr_proto.jpg

 

mbdr_panel.jpg

 

mbdr_oled.jpg

 

Best Regards, Thorsten.

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Yes, just the MB-808 firmware with a special configuration which enables 13 CV outputs (for velocity) at 6bit resolution - the 74HC595 based DACs are part of the PCB as well:

http://svnmios.midibox.org/filedetails.php?repname=svn.mios&path=%2Ftrunk%2Fapps%2Fsequencers%2Fmidibox_808%2Fsetup_seq_dr_default.asm

 

Best Regards, Thorsten.

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