Klee Sequencer (Part 2)

I visited my local electronics shop again today to pick up some more parts for the Klee Sequencer. I also look for some nice led holders and found these ones. The only problem though is that they were wider than the holes that Bridechamber put in the front panel. I don't know what kind of led holders Scott uses, but they need to be very tiny since these ones were the smallest I could find. Well I think these look neat since they are shiney like the rest of the front panel components I selected.

The only scary thing was that I needed to drill holes in this very nice front panel. I think the standard holes were 6 millimeter and for the led holders I selected I needed to drill 8 millimeter holes. Well luckily there is room enough for that. I did a trial first on the Yusynth Noise and Random module I build before. There was still a led holder missing on that as well. I also found out that There are 5 more leds going on the front panel than I anticipated. I only looked at the step position leds, but there is also a clock led and bus leds. Well the electronics shop had enough in stock :)

In the picture on the left you see the result. Looks nice doesn't it? Well I like it anyway. I did have some trouble by the way to get the plastic piece in that holds the led in place in the metal casing. If you look closely in the picture on top you see a little black thing sticking out of the led holder. That has to go all the way in actually to secure the led. And I needed to apply quite some force on to that. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but at least the won't go anywhere anymore now. I'll pick of 5 more leds and led holders somewhere soon and finish it. Now back to the PCB's :)

Klee Sequencer (Part 1)

Today I got the first parts for the Klee Sequencer. I only got some resistors actually and not even all of them. My local electronics supplier was out of 100K 1% resistors. So they had to order them for me. They didn't have time to get the rest yet. There was a choice to make in the design for 5 Volt or 10 Volt trigger voltages. I chose the 5 Volt. I think my stuff will trigger on that. If not I will have to change some resistors later on. This is something to look at when you want to build a Klee sequencer for yourself. In the picture on the left you see the digital PCB by the way.

In the picture on the right you see the analog PCB. I'm also missing the 100K resistors for this one, but then lots of them were stated as 0.1%. My local electronics store actually never heard of that :) I need to see if I can get them somewhere on the Internet. If you have tips please let me know. There is also a possibility to hand match the resistors from 1% types. The mounting holes in these PCB's are quite small actually what makes it difficult to get the solder flowing. But I guess I have to get used to this for this project. Maybe I should look for a smaller tip for my soldering iron.

Here is another picture of the Klee Sequencer front panel together with the PCB's. I'm now studying the building document and I'm looking for the front panel components. There is a lot of switches on there and the building document states that it is important to get quality ones for this. Bridechamber is not selling a component kit for this unfortunately, so I will have to find them somewhere else. Ah well I'm sure I'll find the brands mentioned in the document somewhere. So far this looks like a fun project. I can't wait to get it doing something useful :)

ASM-2 (Part 9)

This evening after dinner I started to test the ASM-2 main PCB. I started with measuring the power. There is a +15/-15 Volt power rail and that seemed to work quite well. Besides there are some +10/-10 Volt reference points on the PCB to use for calibrating purposes. They all looked fine to me. The power regulators got a bit warm, but not hot, so I guess the PSU is holding fine. I hooked up a connector to the common power rail to get a ground for my oscilloscope to be able to look at some signals.

I started by testing the oscillator outputs. On VCO-2 everything looked very nice. I just had to calibrate some of the wave shapers to get symmetric waveforms, but on VCO-1 I found something strange. The sawtooth looked fine and also the square wave, but the sine wave and triangle were completely screwed up. In the picture on the right you see the waveform I got from the triangle wave. This looks more like a distorted saw actually. It clips on +15 and -15 Volt as well and it was supposed to be 10 Volts peak to peak. So time for some trouble shooting.

I started to study the schematics of the oscillator and found quickly that the base waveform is the saw and the other waves are generated from that one. The sine wave is generated from the triangle, so the problem had to be in the wave shaper circuit for the triangle wave. It is based on two diodes and a TL084. After a measuring and comparing to the other VCO I found that on one of the outputs of the TL084 I got no output signal. At first I thought the TL084 was broken, but when I wanted to swap it I felt it was warm. I looked under the PCB and found the problem. A tiny drop of solder was between the output of this IC and a through hole on the PCB. It was so tiny that I missed it on the two earlier inspections I did. But I could measure it.

After I removed it this was the result. On the picture on the right you see a very nice triangle wave. And after this also the sine wave was fine. When I tell it like this it sounds like this was an hour work, but actually it took me the whole evening to find this. But afterwards it is always a gratifying feeling when you solved a problem like this. The next thing is to calibrate the VCO's and test the rest of the modules. I hope that goes a bit smoother. At the moment I'm checking how to hook up everything, but I think I need some more crocodile clamped wires.

AVRSynth 32 (Part 3)

This afternoon I worked some more on the AVRSynth with my daughter. We actually managed to finish the PCB. It was not very exciting since only the connectors were left to solder. Strange thing is that for the small connectors there were two different kinds. One was a regular connector and the other one just a header connector. Ah well it works just the same and eventually it is inside the case so nobody will notice. After that the PCB needed to be mounted on the bottom of the casing. I drilled four holes in the bottom and used nuts and bolts to fasten everything.

After that we started mounting the panel components. First the ones on the rear. Not much there. Just an audio output connector on a jack, a connector for an external 12 Volts DC power supply and a midi jack. Strangly enough I also couldn't find the nuts and bolts that should have come with the midi jack I guess. But well I have enough of those. Then we continued with the front panel. I found the 8 potmeters as stated earlier in the bag with all the potmeters for the ASM-2. It looks like Elby just tossed everything together. Ah well now that I know it is OK.

We started to mount the potmeters. I found out quite quickly that I had to shorten them by sawing a piece of the shaft. Since there are metal it was not a very easy job. While it was doing this my daughter lost concentration and left. But we decided that I would finish this job. I also had a problem later on getting the knobs on. I had to find a special tool to fasten them. The screw is very tiny and is of the Hex/Allen/Imbus type. (I'm not sure what the correct English name is). I finally found one that barely fitted and was able to secure them. The next thing I found out is that the holes for the led holders are too small. So I will have to drill them larger I'm afraid. There is more DIY to this kit actually than I expected. But after this I stopped and will continue again when my daughter feels like it again.

ASM-2 (Part 8)

Last week when I had to stop soldering because it was leaking again, I decided to pick up another job. I took the ASM-2 cabinet down from my modular desk and started to mount the jack connectors to the front panel. There are a lot of them I can tell you. It took me a while before I found an effective method to fasten them and get them straight at the same time. Another thing that puzzled me is that I had 4 stereo jacks and the rest was mono. So I E-mailed Laurie from Elby Designs about this and he got back to me on this.

One turned out to be for the AVRSynth32 actually and I know where to put the other three now. Here you see the whole thing from the back. All the jacks are switchable in order to be able to make the ASM-2 semi-modular. If you look closely at the front panel you can see that besides all the input jacks there is also written where it gets its normalized input from. It took me a while to figure this out by the way. But now I understand it and it makes perfect sense. In the picture you can also see that I can easily take the back of because it is fastened with some magnets.

There are still lots more front panel components left to mount. After the jacks I started sorting and counting the pot meters. And there I also found the 8 missing pot meters for the AVRSynth32. So that problem is solved as well now. Most potmeters are 100K linear, but there are some other ones as well. I'm going to focus first on finding out where they should go. Besides that of course a lot of knobs, and some turn switches, leds, and switches. I'm still struggling a lot with the documentation of the ASM-2, but I'm sure that in time I will understand it all.

After I sorted all the components I decided I did enough mounting of front panel components and looked the PCB's up again from my stack of unfinished electronics. The first thing I had to do was to mount two heat sinks on the power regulators. I got them long time ago from Elby Designs but just didn't mount them yet. After that I started to read again through the documentation to see what power I should apply in able to start testing the PCB's. It turned out that the main PCB needed +24 and -24 Volts. So I put my lab power supply to this and did the famous smoke test. Well no smoke :) So all is set to start testing this PCB. I hope everything works because error seeking will be a pain in the ass on this one :)

Modular Progress Overview

Since I'm working a lot now on my modular project and I only showed you some PCB's and loose panels I thought it would be nice to post a little overview of the modules I have finished now. In the bottom of the picture on the left you can see the Yusynth filter modules I build and the Wogglebug. On top are three modules I bought on E-bay. On the left is a MOTM-120 Sub Octave Multiplier that adds subharmonics, next to that a MFOS Quantizer and next to that the Oakley Noise and Dual filter module that I used to test my other filter modules.

In this picture you see the two MOTM 900 and 950 Power supplies that I build. And also the VC-LFO that I repaired earlier. It has an Oakley front panel, but is actually a MFOS. I do plan to build an Oakley one and swap panels somewhere in the future. On the right you see the Yusynth Random module I build with noise generator and sample and hold. I still haven't fastened any module in the cabinet yet, since I'm still not sure where everything should go. I need to make some kind of plan for that I guess.

And maybe you spotted this front panel in a previous post as well. Here you see it together with the PCB's that go with it. This will become a Klee sequencer from Electro-music.com. It looks really great in this circular setup. I got this front panel from Bridechamber and it was designed by Thomas White. I studied the documentation for this project last week and I ordered all the PCB components. Hopefully they will arrive on Monday and then I can start building this beast :) I can't wait to see it working. This project is the most complex module I build so far. But we all do need a challenge don't we :) I'll keep you posted on the progress as always of course.

Chinese Limestone in the Cinema

I'm still working in the cinema to improve stuff as well. My speakers stand on needles to get clearer sound, but we put thick carpet in the cinema and those needles didn't really do their job any more, since they just disappeared in the carpet resulting in the speakers touching the round anyway. So I started looking for some nice solid and heavy stuff to put under them. Finally we found a nice solution in these Chinese limestone tiles. We found them at a garden specialist. I can be psychological of course, but I'm under the impression that it sounds way better already :)

Oceanography played on Artic Mist Podcast 186

Last week I sent out a whole bunch of promo CD's to radio stations that played my music in the past. And my record label Groove Unlimited did the same. So I hope to get some airplay the coming weeks. Last week the title track from my new album OceanoGraphy was played on the Spanish Artic Mist Podcast #186. It is a very nice show that plays good music, only my Spanish is not so good :( So if you know Spanish it would be great if you could let me know what Jorge said :). You can find the podcast on this URL: http://articmist.podomatic.com/ Look for show #186.

PC Trouble Fixed

I had a very annoying problem with the second PC in my studio. This is not my main audio recording PC, but a PC that I use for video stuff, mastering stuff, sample editing and also some editors for synthesizers are running on it. It is nice that I can do stuff on there that doesn't interfere with recording. But recently it became very slow and after a while it completely froze. It lost it BIOS settings on restarting. I was thinking it was time for a new one, but I decided to have a look first. So I detached all external USB and firewire connections and started removing PCI and PCI-e cards on by one. Suddenly when I removed one of my USB PCI cards it worked fine. So this card probably messed up the PCI buss on the main board. Well I'm very happy that I can use it normally again :)

Yusynth (Part 13)

Today I finished the Yusynth Fixed Filter Bank module. All I had left to to was solder all the PCB wiring to the front panel. As you can see it are quite some wires. I decided to make two separate cable trees with two separate colors to keep the overview. There is still one thing I need to sort out. It seems that the bridechamber front panel is designed for some kind of modification since it has an input potmeter with dry/wet on it and also a bypass switch. Those are not incorporated in the original design by Yves. I will have to look that up.

I decided to first to finish it as Yves has intended so that I can test its functionality. In this picture you can see the other side of the PCB, were you can clearly see the potmeter and switch that are not connected yet. You can also see how far I had to put the two brackets out to be able to mount the PCB on them. On the rear you see two tie raps that actually make sure the PCB doesn't hit the bracket. That could cause a short circuit maybe or at least some unwanted behavior. You can also see that jack is still missing. I haven't received my package from bridechamber yet with the missing nut.

After the wiring was done I tested it again with the noise module. It worked right away. There is no calibrating that needs to be done. I just put all the potmeters on 0 to get none of the input signal to pass and then turned up the potmeters one by one to see if that particular band was passed through. And well they all worked like a charm. Also the odd and even outputs are funny. There you get only half the the bands on the odd and the other half on the even output. I can't think of an application for that yet, but I'm sure it will come in handy sometime. Well another module finished. And at the moment that is all the Yusynth modules I have front panels for now. So I'll have to work on some other project first now untill I get new stuff from Bridechamber.