PAIA MIDICV8

[Bob Zimmer]

I arrived home last night to quite a surprise!  At my doorstep was a box
from PAiA containing a 3 1/2" rack panel and chassis and a MIDICV8 kit.
Could have sworn I ordered it last year!

Well, I agree with those that said PAiA rack kits are 'cheesy'.  It is a
standard 1/8" aluminum panel with drilled slot holes, but the chassis is out
of bent sheet aluminum.  It's fine for my needs in building a four channel
compressor/limiter for recording, but I wouldn't use it for anything that
requires constant plugging and unplugging (rear panel connections) or road
trips.  The front panel would be fine for this.  In all honesty, for the
$31.90 price, I didn't expect more!

On the other hand, I was appreciably suprised by the MIDICV8 kit.  The
circuit board is roughly the same quality as the ASM-1 board from Gene
Stopp.  It's actually fiberglass (everything else I have ever seen from PAiA
used paper boards), double sided, solder masked and plated through holes!
Well done Honcho!

The instructions are also better than anything I've seen from them in the
past!  Parts quality is decent, but I wish they used a cermet 15 turn
trimmer on the V/Oct adjustment.

I do see a couple of mods coming up:

1)  Changing the use of a DIP switch to a rotary switch to select the MIDI
Channel being read.  This would require 4 digit binary coding. Maybe 4016
CMOS switches?

2)  Possibly the installation of a pushbutton for the test modes.

3)  Changing the use of a DIP switch to a rotary switch (will need to figure
out the logic, again!) to select the operating mode.

Once I get this thing built, I'll let you know how it works (I'm a slow
builder though, not much spare time!).

FYI, It has an onboard 5V regulator and can run off any 12 VAC wall wart
transformer or a DC supply 12-18 volts, capable of -V @ 5ma and +V @ 200ma.

I'm very curious about what I can do with the Pitch & Mod Wheel Outputs.


  >=== Bob Zimmer -- Philadelphia PA ===<
  >=== bzimmer at voicenet.com          ===<