MOTM

a) my mother-in-law is having major surgery tomorrow AM and so this week has 
been/will be light on the MOTM aspect. Paul H's family is battling the flu as 
well.

b) I did ship out the CEM chip backlog (a 2 year high!) today, so that means 
next up is the (in)famous MOTM-480 manual AND building remaining VCO kits to 
ship the backlog.

The pacing item for doing the VCO kits is the Tempco resistor. I am low and more 
are due by the 18th. So, the VCO kits will take a few more weeks to 100% ship 
out to everyone, and a few Tempcos are also slated for the '480 kits.

c) If you are interested in what the 'future of MOTM' a la digital modules goes, 
go to www.xilinx.com and look at the Spartan 3 stuff. I ordered the development 
software today for the chip AND the DSP option AND the 32-bit RISC processor 
(MicroBlaze). The MOTM-520 Cloud Generator will be implemented in this 
technology along with other oddball stuff (DX-7 module in 1U?)

I'm NOT abandoning analog: but I AM going to do some (cough) digital stuff 
because this family of chips will allow *cost effective* solutions that if you 
spend the $99 on the dev board and learn the tools, what can be done is pretty 
astonishing. I'm talking the ENTIRE Synergy II on a $15 chip. Or maybe a 
32-voice Prophet VS/Korg WaveStation type synth. $15 chip. Well, and about $50 
of other stuff :) DACs and the like.

Paul S.