Korg Poly800/EX800 Users

Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the 
korgpolyex group:

When the new Hawk-800 retrofit kit becomes available, how many kits are you going to IMMEDIATELY buy? 

o 1 
o 2 
o 3 
o 4 
o none 

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Building the Hawk-800 printed circuit board itself is a straightforward task if you have a decent soldering iron and a pair of small side cutters. A cheap multimeter of almost any kind will help you to check for short circuits after you've put all of the jumpers in place too. There will be photos of the specific places where shorts might be a possibility and will therefore need to be tested with the multimeter.

The challenging part of the job is removing the 28 pin EPROM socket from the main board of the Poly or EX 800. The 28 pin EPROM socket is made out of a hard, brittle material much like bakelite, so it is not that hard to break it up but it requires patience to carefully crush a piece of it at a time and then desolder one pin at a time (doing so 28 times to finish the job). The whole removal takes less than half an hour (I did my third removal in ten minutes) but if you don't have patience and don't have a good pair of small side cutters then it might be a better idea to take it to a local technician. The patience bit is the most important!

The other challenge is removing IC28, the address decoder chip. It's only 16 pins so it's not that difficult to remove but once again, it takes care and patience to remove it. Solder wick will be included in the kit but a desoldering tool of the plunger spring loaded vacuum type will be my strong recommendation. I intend to also provide a third 74HC138 chip just in case people end up needing to remove the original chip from the board by cutting the pins off first and desoldering the pins one at a time. The chip only costs 30 cents so it seems worthwhile adding that in to the kit. Two are needed for the kit anyway and the third is insurance for removing the one that is on the main board.

I began the construction and installations instructions in earnest last night. I'll have photos and text posted on the web site within a week - OK two at the most. The photos will make it much more clearer as to how to remove the 28 pin socket.

I've been working with hardware for 3 decades now so I definitely have forgotten what it was like to approach such a project from a position of zero experience but I've also had many years dealing with people who are not engineers. So I've learned to be very sympathetic to their position of inexperience. But, I intend to make good use of close up photos to demonstrate the best way I've found to remove the socket and the chip.

The other challenge is mounting the board in your Poly 800 or EX 800. I am not going to provide any hardware for doing this. So it will be up to each person to fashion their own. I got mine from the local hardware store so I don't think that is something that I need to supply in the kit. I will provide photos and instruction on how I did my Poly and EX 800 though.
  
Let me know if you have any other questions.

Mike.

Alan Currall <alan@wanlockhead. demon.co. uk> wrote:

Mike,

When are you going to be able to post some detailed instructions of exactly what will be involved in fitting the kit?

I don't know anyone who I could go to who could fit it for me, so I want to be sure it's within my grasp before going ahead and ordering a kit.

Cheers,

Alan

On 27 Feb 2008, at 2:37PM, korgpolyex@yahoogro ups.com  wrote:

Enter your vote today! A new poll has been created for the 
korgpolyex group:

When the new Hawk-800 retrofit kit becomes available, how many kits are you going to IMMEDIATELY buy? 

o 1 
o 2 
o 3 
o 4 
o none 

To vote, please visit the following web page:
http://groups. yahoo.com/ group/korgpolyex /surveys? id=12726141 

Note: Please do not reply to this message. Poll votes are 
not collected via email. To vote, you must go to the Yahoo! Groups 
web site listed above.

Thanks!

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