Category electronics

Sequentix P3 Pot Board

Today I received the enclosure for the Sequentix which I am building. It arrived especially quickly, and I’m quite happy with how it’s made. As one would probably expect, I kept going on the assembly of it tonight, and by the time I called off work I had finished assembling the pot boards and poking around with things.

The I/O board is also complete, but that was done a few days ago. I’ve also almost wrapped up the main board and function switch boards, they are just missing a few small parts which should arrive in the next day or two.

then it’s just a matter of polishing everything off, waiting for the ROMs and a few harder to find ICs from Digi-Key and finishing things up.

Yay!

About that time the MIDIbox SID-NUXX’s should be done too, and I’ll finally have something to trigger the everything with.

Now I’m off to bed.

In the mean time, if you’d like to look at some other photos from my assembly of the P3, check out these links: The Parts (photo gallery retired) · In Progress (photo gallery retired)

Is there anyone who is reading this who has an EPROM programmer (and eraser, maybe) that I can borrow?

DOS / Windows / Linux / whatever support, I can make it work.

I need to write up to five 2732A EPROMs.

Thanks very much.

First Layout

Well, there’s the first layout. I’ll check things over tonight / tomorrow and hopefully order the boards by tomorrow evening.

As only two are currently spoken for, I’m only going to order five. So, if you want one, speak up. Just so you know, I guess they’ll also work in the Casio SK-5.

Also, I received a confirmation email about the front and rear panels for the MIDIbox SID-NUXX and they should ship to me on the 28th. Woo!

Now, time to go home.

Are any of you interested in having a MIDI-fied Casio SK-1? It doesn’t add full control, but it does allow one to trigger all keys remotely via MIDI.

I had tried to etch my own PCB for it before, but because of a crappy design and the difficulties of fine pitch doing double-sided boards at home, I stopped.

I’m wanting to get this project finished, so I’m going to lay out a new PCB and have it manufactured. Should be about $15/board once done. Plus parts, of course. But you’ll have to source those yourself.

Anyway, anyone want one?

(My boards are based on the info here.)

MIDIbox SID-NUXX Front Panel PCB

PCBs all milled and trimmed. I’m going to pick up the first front panel in something like two hours.

If everything goes as planned, there will be a complete MIDIbox SID-NUXX sitting on my workbench tonight.

< glee! >

Then I’ll just have to place one more (rather pricey) order and all five MIDIbox SID-NUXX’s will be ready to go. The three I’m building, and the two which are being sent to and . I’m really excited.

(Photo of the rear of the PCB showing how close the traces are to the edge of the board.)

UPDATE: I’ve just discovered that I seriously screwed up something on these PCBs. Basically, the switches are eternally pressed. I think I can fix it with some simple trace cutting, but I need to take a long look at it to be sure. Guh. I feel like an idiot. I must have somehow drawn the part wrong in EAGLE and then used it…

< sigh >

I would swear that I checked it at least three times, too.

This really bothers me. I think I’ll go eat a meal, pick up the front panel from ‘s house, then decide what needs to be done.

Well, it turns out that there is a slight error in the layout of the display for the MIDIbox SID-NUXX. Everything on it is sized *perfectly* for the LCD display. As it turns out, the ‘active area’ of the OLED is a bit smaller than that of the LCD, and thusly the buttons on the front panel are slightly misaligned (by a max of 1.2mm I believe) when using an OLED instead of an LCD.

Oops.

In reality, it likely won’t be noticable, especially with the display being set back a few mm from the inside of the metal panel anway. So, it’s nothing to worry about…

Oh, the PCBs I received yesterday? Look / work great, and I’ve had no problems whatsoever with cutting the center out of the first one. I used the combination of Dremel / used dental bit mill and a hand file with a vise. Worked great. Only problem was the epoxy / fiberglass dust, so I may do the remaining ones in the garage.

But that won’t be until next week. For now I’m out here on vacation. Woo!

Whoops. Someone from Front Panel Express just called to tell me that my design for the MIDIbox SID-NUXX rear panel I had drawn the slots in a manner which caused some problems with the milling. One of their engineers fixed the drawing and re-cut a new end panel, but they wanted to tell me that in the future the drawing should be done a bit differently.

(The problem was that I drew the angled slots by taking a milled hole, slanting the sides 45°, and making the corner radius that of the tool. In the future I should draw a line and rotate it 45° instead.)

I just wrote up a quick article on how I remove flux from PCBs after assembling them.

If you’d like to read it and see some sample photos of a PCB before and after cleaning, take a look at the article here: http://www.nuxx.net/wiki_archive/A/Flux_Removal