Pushing My Buttons

In a previous post I mentioned that my Boss RRV-10 was missing some button caps, and I had obtained an RCL-10 to use for, amongst other things, a template to reproduce the missing caps.

The two on the front were missing, as was the one on the back.

Well with a little bit of cussing and cursing I managed to cook up a model in FreeCAD for the buttons, and printed them out on my 3D printer.

I even got the little ridges on the top of the smaller button, though the clear filament makes them a bit hard to see unless you're looking at it in profile.

For scale, this smaller button is about 1cm by 1cm. Ok, it's exactly 1cm by 1cm.

Now unfortunately 3D printers are good at rapid prototyping, not rapid getting it right the first time, and I had some tolerance and fit issues with the first attempt.

The larger buttons at the front were bulging out around the shaft, and the smaller one at the rear wouldn't even go on. On top of all this, the larger buttons were a bit flimsy on the sides due to the thin walls.

Thankfully this was an easy fix, and printing out a new set of buttons didn't take long.

And this time they fit flawlessly, and pushed in and out just like they should.

Both on the front, as you can see, and on the back.

The only shortcoming really is that the colours are very much not correct, but it doesn't bother me particularly much so I'll probably just leave it as is. I really don't want to have to buy two cans of spray paint just to almost-but-not-really match the original colours.

Drat and Darn

While doing laundry today I noticed that one of my dish towels was getting a bit threadbare in spots.

And it was also coming loose at the hem a little bit.

This of course won't do, so naturally to the sewing machine I went. First up, securing the hem.

And with that done, it's on to darning. Now unfortunately these holes are in a multi-coloured area of the weave, and doubly unfortunately the blue shade is one I don't have a matching thread for. Somewhat frustratingly, thread is most often sold in highly saturated colours, so a faded blue like this is much harder to come by.

Still, I did my best.

Now white, on the other hand, is pretty easy to find in threads, so filling in the stripes was a good deal easier.

Though unfortunately these stripes being a twill means that there's quite a bit less white on the back side, so the patch stands out a touch more there.

But such is life.

Stomp Around

To follow up on yesterday's pedal board post, I would like to announce that I got the patch cables and installed them.

That is all.

Clap, Hey

If you want to stomp, it helps to have a board to stomp on, and oh hey I wonder what's in this bag?

Well would you look at that, it's a pedal board.

And it's sized just right for my four pedals.

Now it's probably obvious from appearances, but a pedal board is designed to hold pedals, so that they generally stay put and so they're more easily transported from place to place.

They don't stay put on their own, though, which is where the velcro comes into play.

And now they're properly stuck.

Of course, pedals need power to do their thing, and luckily this pedal board comes equipped with a 4-way power supply.

So that should keep things juiced up.

I still need the patch cables so I can hook the pedals to each other, but in the meantime we can enjoy seeing how well they fit into the soft case.

Yup, looks like they're all ready for me to take them to a gig.

But I never will.

It Was Bound To Happen Eventually

I decided to make one (1) music. It's called "Title Screen Music From An Amiga Game Your Older Brother Used To Play" because it felt like a fitting name. It's nominally synthwave but there's probably some elements of other genres mixed in too.

This was done on my Yamaha QY100 and recorded on my Yamaha MT4X. I mostly made it to serve as elevator music during less interesting parts of my videos, which I did on my latest upload and I think it works well for that.

BBrraaiinnss

So it's that time again.

This JX-305 came up for sale with those four sweet words "For Parts or Repair".

The seller indicated that the synth stopped working after they had played a gig on a boat, in which they were forced to leave the synth out in some misty rain because they didn't have anything to cover it with. I was quite confident that the rain had nothing to do with the failure, so I made a bid and it arrived on my bench.

When I powered the synth on, it was indeed dead as a doornail.

The display was blank, none of the LEDs were lit other than the Beat light which was glowing orange (it's only ever supposed to be red or green in normal operation), and basically everything was unresponsive. Not a positive first step.

However, much like the MC-505, which this synth is based on, the CPU has a hard-coded bootloader that you can access by holding down the right keys when powering it on.

The magic combination is to hold down "Mute Ctrl" while powering the synth on, and then tap on "3/High Hat" a few seconds later.

Well that's looking better already. Let's see how far we can get with this.

Well, it's taking data, and...

Hmm, nope, no good. Well, that explains why the main processor isn't booting: if it can't write a firmware image it sure isn't going to be able to read it back either.

Having a peek inside, we can see some big flat-pack chips soldered down with our good friend lead-free solder.

This one in particular is the flash chip that holds the firmware, and I think it needs a little love. So, come along for the adventure and see where it takes me!

I promise it'll be fun. Or, well, it was for me at least.

A World of Sound

My XV-5050, being a moderately modern ROMpler, contains quite a few samples of quite a few instruments.

But, you know, it could always use a few more. Perhaps a great deal more. Maybe a whole world of sounds?

The Roland ROMplers from this era take "SRX" expansion cards, which include a bunch more instrument samples, plus presets that arrange these samples into a set of tones to form a patch, including information about what effects to apply, what sort of envelope to use to shape the sound, and so on.

The XV-5050 in particular has two SRX slots, which you access by removing a cover from the top panel. You can even see the huge Roland DSP in the corner there whose leads had lifted off the solder pads, which I had to reflow to get this unit working again.

Anyway, the SRX cards themselves are basically just a carrier for a set of mask ROMs, which are the large chips you see here.

There's also a handful of passives, capacitors and resistors mostly, the connector, and two more ICs.

The smaller of these two chips is a TC7W34FU which is a triple non-inverting buffer chip. It's simply used to buffer the signals to the other IC, which is a 93LC46X EEPROM. The EEPROM is writeable from the main unit although I don't know if that functionality is used in the stock firmware. The entire EEPROM is only 128 bytes (1kbit), so it likely only contains some very basic identification and configuration information for the card, and not anything like the patch data.

Anyway, with that curiosity out of the way, let's stick it into the XV.

It's got this sort of twist-lock tab on one corner that's meant to keep it from falling out but it's honestly a bit of a pain to use. I got it in there, though, and that's what matters.

Well, what really matters is actually whether it works or not, so let's check that.

Yup, there we go. A whole world of sounds at my fingertips!