Yesterday was a great day...

So, what's the news?

Well, assembly is going great, and yesterday I powered up the machine for the first time after wiring it up. At first nothing happened. After a few scary minutes I figured I forgot to put the fuses in the power entry connector :-)

Next problem - nothing showed up on the screen, and something smelled funny... The keyboard and sequencer seemed to work though, but no sound could be heard.

After a bit more debugging, and an hour of work, the following was fixed:
- New cable for the display - six of the wires had snapped!
- The smell came from the display backlight overheating, I have to switch to a less powerful current source or something
- The missing sound was due to the two midi wires going from the controller to the analogue parts being swapped.

So, after working for a couple of hours the machine actually works!

It does however have some errors:
- The sampled sounds (Hi hat, cymbals) don't work
- The main output doesn't work (though the headphone amp works very well)
- The first step key and the left-arrow key are mixed up somehow
- Four leds are either broken or a data line is not working as intended.
- The software is slightly buggy, it crashes sometimes. No idea what causes this.

Also, the wires from the pots have to be replaced as they are too big, and the spacers between the keyboard and the aluminium back plate are too short, making it impossible to mount the display and keyboard at the same time.

All in all I'm quite satisfied with the result. I brought the machine to work today for a little demo, and my colleague rocked away ;-)

Display reconnected

I've just merged the older LCD panel code base with my newer keyboard/LED code, and also connected the LCD display to the new controller card for the first time. To my big surprise it worked immediately! Finally both the LCD screen and the keyboard are up and running at the same time. And it only took me about 3 years ;-)



I also constructed a new cable and added connectors to the LCD end as well, as the soldered-on cable started to show some wear and tear. As the connector on the controller end is a normal ribbon cable connector, but the other end requires a 2,54mm spacing of the cables, I had to add to come up with a special solution. I am very satisfied with the end result, both in terms of how the cable looks and how it will fit the system.

Schaeffer rules!

I received some new perspex panels from Schaeffer yesterday, and must say they blew me away. This time I ordered some brackets and the window for the LCD display. Through some moment of enlightment I decided to put the text engravings for the display window on the reverse side of the panel. This turned out incredibly well and really improved on the overall feel of quality. Pics will be up shortly. However, it made me realise that I much rather want to silk-screen the text on the front panel than engrave it... *sigh* - there goes another 1500 kroner...

Display working

I've rewritten my old sequencer code to accomodate changes to the circuit design. Some of the display pins were shifted around. In the process, I discovered that the circuit was set to use 8px wide fonts while my software uses 6px fonts. To fix this I've modified the cable between the controller and display. I've also added a jumper to version 1.2 of the controller hardware, making it possible to switch between 6 and 8 pixel wide fonts.

I had to add a 1us delay to the data output functions too, to prevent 'lost bytes' when writing to the display.

Files:
Eagle sch and pcb files (hardware)
MikroC software