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NOW AVAILABLE - Korg Poly-800 replacement joystick knob

NOW AVAILABLE - Korg Poly-800 replacement joystick knob

2009-12-26 by korgpolyex800

For those of you unlucky enough to have a Poly-800 that is missing its joystick knob, I have 200 custom manufactured knobs available at http://patrioticduo.tripod.com/hawk800/buythekit.html

These knobs are manufactured from similar high quality ABS plastic.

But I had them manufactured with slightly larger diameter so that they're easier to operate than the Korg original.

You can see a close up picture of the knob here http://patrioticduo.tripod.com/hawk800/

The knobs are $15 dollars each plus $1 package and shipping.

I only have 200 knobs so don't delay!

Enjoy!

Mike

Cheap MIDI USB interfaces

2009-12-29 by Michael Hawkins

Hi Poly fans,

Over the last two years I've sold about 40 HAWK-800 kits. Generally, each customer has carefully constructed both the kit itself and also carefully modified the main board. I've had only one complete failure where the enthusiast was too impatient and used a horrible soldering iron to destroy the HAWK printed circuit board. Other than that, a slightly more common problem has been failure to send the software to the HAWK using the three system exclusive files and MIDI-OX.

So I bought a couple of cheap MIDI to USB cables. These are the type that you can buy on ebay for about 5 bucks each and they're the type that don't require any additional software because they are supposed to work with the standard Windows drivers.

Well, what I found in my testing was that the interface works perfectly with LINUX but fails miserably with Windows XP which would seem to suggest that the problem is with the windows driver and not the actual hardware itself.

Anyway, it's something to look out for when picking up cheap MIDI interfaces.

But also, I've now updated the boot code to include much better error messages in the flashing process. This includes a data validity check (checksum) being done to ensure that the flash ROM has an exact copy of the downloaded firmware.

Mike.

Re: [korgpolyex] Cheap MIDI USB interfaces

2009-12-29 by Gordon JC Pearce

Michael Hawkins wrote:

> So I bought a couple of cheap MIDI to USB cables. These are the type
> that you can buy on ebay for about 5 bucks each and they're the type
> that don't require any additional software because they are supposed to
> work with the standard Windows drivers.

You know what would be good? Replacing the whole damn MIDI interface
with a USB-to-MIDI chip. I'm pretty sure it's just a case of getting
something like an FTDI and blowing the appropriate magic into it.

Gordon MM0YEQ

Re: [korgpolyex] Cheap MIDI USB interfaces

2009-12-29 by ASSI

Am 29.12.2009 16:44, schrieb Michael Hawkins:
> Well, what I found in my testing was that the interface works perfectly with LINUX but fails miserably with Windows XP which would seem to suggest that the problem is with the windows driver and not the actual hardware itself.

Yes, this is unfortunately the case and even though Microsoft knows it,
they won't fix it, ever (go buy Vista was what they told me). When
Windows has to fragment SysEx buffers, it removes four bytes and inserts
two bytes of gibberish, IIRC. With MIDI-OX you can get around this by
specifying a large enough MIDI send buffer (one that can hold a complete
block of sysex). The other option is to use the Windows Media Player,
which apparently adjusts the size of the buffer (or uses a large enough
buffer anyway).

--
Achim.

(on the road :-)

Re: [korgpolyex] Cheap MIDI USB interfaces

2009-12-29 by Atom Smasher

linux notes for the archive or faq....


On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, Michael Hawkins wrote:

> Well, what I found in my testing was that the interface works perfectly
> with LINUX but fails miserably with Windows XP which would seem to
> suggest that the problem is with the windows driver and not the actual
> hardware itself.
============

anything "class compliant" should "just work" with linux. i'm using a
tapco "link.midi" without any problems (for what it is, it's reasonably
cheap). i've also got an "el cheapo" midi cable that partially works with
linux, but doesn't handle sysex. so if someone is looking for a bare-bones
cheap option and you found one that works, i'd suggest they go with that.

for anyone using a command line on linux, i would suggest using "amidi" to
dump the sysex files. it's part of the "alsa-utils" package.

first, find what interfaces are available:
amidi -l

then, something like this will dump the file to the interface:
amidi -p hw:1,0,0 -s file.syx

if you buy a link.midi and it's needs an OS update, the same process can
be used to upgrade the OS from linux. just download the latest update from
tapco's web site and adapt the windows/midi-ox instructions... it works
fine with amidi.


--
...atom

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