Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Seems like today is the day for updates. :)

Today I shipped off the data for the final pre-production PCB. This PCB has all the intended changes from the last one and the purpose of making it is to make absolutely sure every change was done correctly and I didn't mess up anything else. (It's no fun to have 1 hole size a bit too small) This board will be back in a week, and then it's a few more days to get it populated and checked out.

The FS is working quite well here, and I'm just touching up and tweaking a few more software issues. I'm going to try and get demos on the site soon, because I know a lot of you have been waiting for that. (Where was Robert's phone number....) :)

The tweaking has to do with the range for both the the fine tune and the coarse tune knobs. There have been some private discussions about these things, how many knobs, size of the knobs, range of the knobs, etc.. I've considered everyone's input, believe me. Please don't send me a zillion emails about it or it will be even later than it already is!

The form factor is basically what you see in the Illustrator image on the site. The knobs will remain the size as shown during NAMM, which are the same size as the UEG knobs. I didn't feel that a "large" knob for the sake of it being large was worthwhile. It actually looks a little weird and didn't help the operation of the Coarse adjustment. The LEDs have been moved slightly, but other than that, you won't notice much of a physical change.

There are plenty of circuit changes however. The unit has been changed to a through-zero design, so if both frequency knobs are straight up, you have almost no shift. It can't go to 0Hz, but the lowest frequency is about 30mHz. If you're monitoring the UP shift jack, turning either knob clockwise from center will cause the output frequencies to increase; turning either knob counter-clockwise (or anti-clockwise for all the non-US customers) from center will cause the output frequencies to increase. This is a big change from the NAMM proto, and should be more flexible to people. The upper limit on shifting is about 1.5KHz. I'm not sure if that matters much because it sounds like hell anyway once the shift range gets up in that area. The shifter seems to have most appeal at lower frequencies. Your feedback in this are is appreciated and still up for tweaking.

As a side note, even though Paul has a MIDI-CV module just around the corner, I am still planning on doing one as well, hopefully it will be different enough that you have a clear reason to choose one or the other.

The MIDI-CV will have an interface that can be used to reprogram all of my other modules. (I've planned on using the same family of microcontroller in all of them, and there is a header on each UEG, Frequency shifter, etc that can be used for firmware updating. It's a standard header defined by Atmel, so if you happened to own an Atmel AVR programmer of any sort, you could update the code in any of my modules. The upcoming MIDI-CV will have it built in, so the plan is to have firmware updates for other modules download via MIDI and have my MIDI-CV do the programming on the other modules. This would all an update like the UEG to happen without me having to manually update each one.

Thanks again for your patience, and your support.

Regards,
Tony