MB6582 Rackmount Revisisted / Switch Matices

[m00dawg]

Back in 2013 I was trying to devise a rackmount version of the MB6582 and what really nerfed that idea was how much it would cost to have all the control surface boards fabricated from OshPark. I rather liked the approach I ended up with, which was to mount the shift registers to the control boards themselves and just connect them end to end (similar to how DIN/DOUT boards work). This year I was thinking of tackling it again, but sadly lost some of that work and again realized that the board costs are non-trivial.

Instead, I was thinking of going back to leavning on the MB6582's DIN/DOUT design which uses a switch matrix for the buttons or just using separate DIN/DOUT modules directly and wiring things up more like the Rev C control surface. In both cases I can likely make things work using protoboards. Using the switch matrix makes the most sense, but I'm not sure how I would go about wiring something like that across multiple separate control surface boards? Can anyone shed light on how that might work?

[TheAncientOne]

I was looking at something similar, though in a more industrial design. I wanted to do 'voice cards', as eurocards, and plug them into a backplane, allowing me to break out I2C for an AOUT NG and have space for a set of my 2044 filter cards.

I intended to make a 'dumb' control surface, in a separate desktop case, and use proper CAN buffer chips to  allow a longer cable between the sections. As a mark 1 version I was going to use the spare MB 6582 base board card I have to house the 4 voice PICs and their SIDs. I also thought about having separate illuminated buttons for wave selection etc., to avoid stepping through options in live use.

For now, I am still learning how to drive my MB6582, so this went on the back burner.

[m00dawg]

Ah yeah that sounds nifty! I could see some pretty neat applications with that while keeping things clean (thinking of a filter stage such as an SSM2044 kinda thing). If I can figure out how to wire the MB6582 matrix, I think it makes the most sense to do it that way if it's not a total nightmare.