Hi Poly fans,
I've been completely swamped with work, family canoe trips, golf and
using up the last good days of warm weather in 2007. But I haven't
forgotten my favorite pet project either. Here's another little update.
I've been looking at our progress so far, what with new sysex
functions, the new wide playing feature, the odd, even note cascade,
the global parameters, full sysex single patch dump send and receive
etc. It's all been good but I know that many other potential mod's
could be implemented with digital potentiometers etc. But I had a hard
think about what the first mod kit should look like and I've decided
that the first kit will be a memory and software upgrade only and will
NOT have any digital potentiometers on board. However, I have designed
the board such that adding a second board for real performance control
through the digital potentiometers will be just a daisy chain of one
header cable.
The long and short of it is that I've done about 90 percent of the PCB
design so that I'll be looking to do a prototype run of the mod kit
board within the next 30 days or so. The new board will also have a
third EEPROM so that the space available for new software functions
will grow past my prototype board by another 8K. So the production mod
kit will contain a "massive" 24 kilobytes of space plus the original
boot ROM of 8K.
I am now going to be contacting board manufacturers to find out how
much it's going to cost per board with an initial run of 100 boards.
The question in the back of my mind right now is just how many people
are totally and completely serious about buying the mod kit. It will
require removing the ROM socket (IC22) and chip select chip (IC29).
Both need to be replaced with normal profile IC sockets (supplied in
the kit). But the removal of the EPROM socket and the chip select
chips can be tricky to do.
I would very much appreciate it if I got a definite show of hands from
as many of you as possible as to whether you are quite serious about
obtaining the mod kit. I suspect the kit will cost somewhere between
75 and 100 dollars. Add shipping of not more than say - 10 bucks. I
think it safe to say the kit will be close to 100 bucks.
Just how many of you are willing to say - "Count me in" ?
Any and all feedback will be very much appreciated.
Mike.