Deckard's Dream DIY (Part 7)

In the previous part I already said the Decard's Dream was coming alive. I had a menu on the display. Here is a picture of the display and knobs. I already put on the volume knob as well. The display is small but very high resolution so it is readable, but I do need my glasses for that :) So first I scrolled through all the settings to see what is there. I did find some interesting settings that I will try out later. But for now I especially want to know if everything works. I could not find a good test procedure on the build site so I started googling to see what other people did. And apparently it is a good idea to start testing all the knobs and sliders.

There is a special option in the menu to calibrate the sliders first. There are a number of sliders with a dent in the middle position. They go both up and down. Pitch course and fine. Balance between oscillator one and two, overall brilliance and the keyboard control sliders. You have to set them in the middle position before you start calibrating. Then there is a special option in the menu called 'debug' with this you can test all the sliders and know one by one. It reads out the value from 0 to 255. But I did see some stepping while doing this. I was a bit surprised. But I will figure that out later. For now all sliders seemed to work.

Nest thing to do was connecting the IO board back to the main board. It is connected via a flat cable. Here is the main output (mono) and also the midi connectors and the usb connectors. I hooked it up with USB to my notebook and then you get midi over USB. Next thing up was testing all the voice boards. I inserted a voice board in the first slot next to the Power Supply boards because I assumed that was the first slot. Then hookup up a midi keyboard to my notebook and used Midi-OX to connect the keyboard to the Deckards Dream. I expected to get some audio even though I would assume it would be out of tune or something, but nothing happened :( Then I read on the forum that you need to calibrate the voice boards, so I went in the menu and selected that option. Nothing happened. Like it didn't see the voice board at all. So i tried another voice board and same problem. I started panicking a bit and posted on the forum. But I was impatient for as answer and they I saw I made a very stupid mistake :) The slot next to the Power Supply board is actually slot 8 and now 1 :/ Duhh..

So then I calibrated the first board and it worked :) I had sound. After that I did all the boards I had complete since I still missed a couple of IC's. The supplied didn't send me the right amount. I had 6 complete boards and they all worked like a charm. They I wanted to hear the Deckard's Dream with multiple voices and inserted the 6 good boards, but apparently my lab power supply could not take that amount of power, so finally I got 4 running. I must say it sound fantastic :) Even mono and without any effects just on my headphones. So first thing to do was order a 12V external power supply that can deliver 6 Amp. I think the Deckards Dream has a high power on current, since with the four boards installed it only took 1 Amp on 12V, and my lab power supply should be able to deliver 3 Amp. We'll see when the power supply arrived. More next time.