MOTM

Well, the Kurzweil ribbon, from the outside, seems to the a bit of 
the opposite.  There's a long sheet of plastic that's creased along 
the middle, so the whole thing rides up a few millimeters along the 
middle... like an inverted trench.  Imagine keeping either a copper 
wire or your resistive element imbedded in that trench, and having 
the other end placed flat along the bottom.  you'd press down on the 
plastic, and it would smush down in the middle spot.  the stuff was 
obviously pretty resilient, though, otherwise it would wear out 
fairly quickly.

Now, I *really* don't mean to slander any company, but some past 
experiences suggest we may not want to trust the K2500-era kurzweil 
stuffs design as a model of reliability.  Still, I've never heard of 
any problems with the ribbon controller on a 2500.  (also, i've never 
seen an expressionmate)

the korg stuff has a similar approach, but instead of having the 
plastic be propped up, the wire seems to be more obviously embedded 
in the plastic, there's a ridge along it.  Although it's probably 
just cosmetic, the idea of deforming plastic to push a wire into a 
ridge underneath is a good one, I think.

--- In motm@y..., Adam Schabtach <adam@s...> wrote:
> Something I¹ve long wondered about, but haven¹t tried, is using the 
flat,
> black, conductive strip in a disposable anti-static wrist strap as 
the
> resistive element in a ribbon controller. I remember reading years 
ago that
> the stuff has a fair amount of resistance, and is reasonably 
uniform and
> hence has a reasonably linear resistance/length relationship.
> 
> I might have one of these things in the corner of a box 
somewhere... Now
> that I've started building a MOTM system I'm unearthing a lot of old
> electronics stuff that I set aside years ago.
> 
> --Adam
> (who is very happy because his first shipment of kits arrived 
yesterday!)