Putney Poor Man's Patcher

I was at the Vintage Synth Museum and got to screw around with a Classic VCS3 Putney.  No, not a clone, not a VST; this is the real thing. This is an incredible sounding synth and deserves its legendary status, but the best part I think is the peg board patcher.

You put in pins to choose from a matrix of patching options:

I'd love to be able to include a Putney style peg patcher in some of my DIY projects. But...I have not seen patch bays like this for sale, have read if you ever do find one they cost hundreds of dollars. So let's DIY. Can we do this budg?

Whipped this up with Eagle:

Had ten of these made up at JLCPBC in China. $5 for all of them. If anyone is interested comment and I'll post the Eagle files and gerbers somewhere.

OK--need the pegs. But what,Scotty, what? Bought these on Ebay--chose them carefully based on the size of the vias in the wire pads found in the PCB, they were about $25 USD for a hundred:

Laid everything out:

Screwed it all together (still missing top nuts; added after I took this photo):

Let's test!

Does it work?

Yes!

With the peg through hole 1 x 1 from top board to bottom is continuous. Same for all other pins.

I now can see putting buffers and mixers around this matrix, but the basic idea--the ability to patch with one of the pins--is sound. Heck I could even build little plastic tops for the pegs and epoxy em on there?

But here's the rub, literally--Will it last? I can see the pegs wearing out the vias in the top board. Hard to say how many patches you'll get out of this system--I guess that's to be seen.

I've only patched each point about 10 times, some less. On the putney at the museum a few patch points were worn out--and that was the real deal--so I guess nothing lasts forever. I might need to find slightly smaller diameter pegs? That might spare the vias a bit longer? Or springy pegs somehow?

But anyway for now this simple matrix patcher works!

Applications: I may apply this to the noise! circuit from reverselandfill that I've been screwing with for months. That would be a good test and that circuit needs a large switching matrix.  Or maybe for an entire Lunchbox Lunetta setup. No idea really.

UPDATE 10-6-19 using 2.5mm spring banana plugs purchased from Amazon; it works!  I modded the top board w. 82mil drills, which seems to be the right size. I think the top board will last much longer, since the plugs are spring loaded; I patched and unpatched a whole bunch of times and couldn't see a lot of wear on the top board under my microscope.  Thanks to E-M member Phobos for suggesting this improvement.

And why not use a 2.5mm banana patch cord to mult matrix points?

OK that's it for this time, I'd say don't breathe the fumes but for this one NO SOLDERING. Ahoy.

Super Sounding, Super Low Parts Count DIY Balanced Modulator: Burr Brown 4214RM

Does the world have enough Balanced Modulators? Maybe and yet, I'm still building them.

This time it's a super low parts count--wait! check that, ridiculously low parts count B-Mer--courtesy electro-music.com maven mvcl.

Turns out mvcl is a neighbor, living only a few blocks away from me in sunny California, US of A; we began trading emails and meeting up at our local Modular Synth electronics meet up.  And! MVCL has access to some great chip pulls from the old days, some coming from video boards he built in the late 1970's.

One chip of interest to DIY audio is the Burr Brown analog multiplier, the BB4214:

mvcl asked me if I was interested in messing with this chip and after looking at the datasheet--the chip has tremendously good specs--I said sure!! and so he dropped one off at my house.

Before too long I had its "connection diagram" on a breadboard, super simple--literally NO external parts! Wait, no additional parts?  YES! NO ADDITIONAL PARTS!  Just +/- 15V DC power (note to Eurorack/Doepfer-smokers--this should work fine with +/- 12V as well!), 2 audio waveform sources, some jumpers, a scope and audio amp/speakers to test:

I grounded X2 and Y2--but if you want to use balanced audio coming in, it's good to go!  Pin 11 can be open or grounded, and from my experiments the 100K resistor is not necessary.

It sounded--GREAT! Clear, crisp, clean, with little to no feed through, no hiss, no cross-tweeze, just as the specs would indicate.

So it's on to the next step--perf board!! Readers of this blog know I hate (and am very crappy at) perf-boarding and strip-boarding, but this one is so simple even I can't screw it up. I added a simple 4x unity gain buffer board--get info on the buffer board I used on my website, here: 2 buffers for the inputs, 2 buffers for the outputs. Again super easy.

The board on the left is the 4x unity gain buffer PCB I created a few years ago. 

It was a piece of cake to wire this mishpucha to a Frac 1U Panel, add a few jacks and so on, the whole thing took maybe a couple of hours, including breadboard and test time. Yeh!!!

I built this thing as fast as I could and it still worked first time!

Ready to test. Works!  FPE front panel has been ordered...UPDATE 9-17-19 ha! Back and in!

Here's a MOV-ie of the board being tested. This is 2x VCO's (ramp), VCO1 modulated by an LFO and then fed into the X input, VCO2 fed right into the BM's Y input; BM output to my near field monitors. That's it.

In case you want to hear more: bonus sound clip is here.

OK could anything be easier? This chip can still be found on Ebay ($10-$25 each, worth it!), I am not sure if different flavors of the chip sound different, but if you want to mess with a super easy to build balanced modulator, I mean it can't possibly get any easier than this, the BB4214 is highly recommended.  

Many thanks to mvcl for turning me onto this great old chip and all his encouragement and enthusiasm.  Until next time, happy BMing!

Attenuverter Part I: Prototyping the SEM way to do this--Pot with Center Tapped Ground

All hail the mighty attenuverter!  This time I build one--and I break one of my cardinal rules and strip board most the prototype--spent 2 days doing that--UGH!  But now it all works, sounds good I think, and should lead to an interesting PCB project, maybe this month? We'll see!

Here we go:

Backroundverter: I laid eyes on my first attenuverter in an Oberheim SEM (circa 1977?). I was barely old enough to drive and also lucky enough to be doing synth programming for a local recording studio; they had an unbelievably cool Obie with x8 SEMS, customized to chooch on 2 banks of 4 SEMS, giving me 4 stacked polyphonic voices. Wow! Mono was still king back then for the most part; the Obie 8 voice sounded frigging GREAT!

The idea of choosing between + (normal) and - (inverted) mod for a CV was super cool; especially for the VCF when set to bandpass, highpass or notch. The SEM synth sounded, well, they are SEMs! Damn, it's freaking Oberheim!!!

Be gentle--it's my First Attenuverter: The SEM is chock a block full of 'em!

How it works: an attenuverter is basically a single pot mixer. Noon is zero gain; CCW is 0 to 100% of one signal, CW is 0-100% another.  Most often the CCW signal is an inverted form of the CW signal or rarely, visa versa.

You can find euro attenuverter modules all over: for instance, here, here, and here, and of course MATHS has one--yep, 40+ years later these puppies are everywhere!

The basic circuit fragment looks like this--it's easy: one op amp, one pot, and a few resistors:

I have created an online SIM of this circuit fragment here if you want to mess with it. Or lay it out on a breadboard, this is easy stuff.

But be warned: on the bench the above fragment doesn't sound as good as the SEM's. There is bad control w/ this fragment close to noon, and maybe from 10AM to 2PM; it's like someone screwed up the taper--you get very little, then you get too much. Good enough? Nope.

There is a blog post that hops up this circuit fragment here to address: here, before going down the SEM road, check that out?

But I took a different and more difficult approach, since I wanted to 100% nail Oberheim's take on the attenuverter. Why ever make things easy?

The SEM schematic is online here; from that, turns out Oberheim uses (used?) a relatively obscure part for the SEMs attenuverters: potentiometers with center tap ground.  This is a normal pot but with an extra leg halfway down the pot's winding. Using this "fourth leg" you can hook the middle of the winding to ground or whatever else you want and then wipe to your heart's content:

Take a deep breath:ALPS RK11K114F30C0B104 WITH CENTER TAP

Having never heard of this part, I confirmed with Tom Oberheim via email (and yes, he emailed me back! Yeh!) that a CT-ground pot is key to the classic SEM's attenuverter. yes it is!

And good news: Mouser has an ALPS version here (data sheet is here) so I bought a few.

The ALPS center tap ground pot!

Bread boarding this part on my trusty Radioshack learning lab thingy, yep, works as advertised.

Basic layout is this:

Front view of the CTpot

If you hook the center tap to ground, as you approach noon with the pot's wiper more and more of the + in is shunted to ground, same idea for in - (which I mistakenly label as the other IN +).

From here it's an easy matter of having an input buffered and inverted and presenting each signal to the appropriate lug:

A and B are op amp buffers, B inverts while A doesn't. I used some jelly bean SMT boards I created for other projects, you can find details here, but really any buffer/inverter will work, and there are lots of variations to choose from.

I also added Bias Offset/Amplitude modulation independently for each side (the CT pot makes that easy!); more information on that idea is here.

And the output follower/buffer--which arguably isn't needed at all if your design disallows the op amps to short to directly ground--is the same unity buffer amp you see everywhere:

Building the Prototype: I was in a rush to get my Center Tap ground pot into play so I went against one of my cardinal rules and strip boarded this prototype (but isn't everything we DIYers build a prototype?). This led to the usual flubs, screw ups, cursing, fear and loathing, and reminding myself how much I hate strip board, but I did finally get it to work.

I'm sick of the thing now though, and probably won't create a front panel for this messy bunch of wires and daughter boards; rather, come up with an improved PCB and front panel and go from there.
Update: yes I did! Long live the Mike Matthews antistrip boarding society! Go to part II of this post here.)

If you want me to post more details about the this circuit I can; comment below.

OK, some obligatory build photos:

The pot/knob "tall trimmer" thingys are available from Modular Addict here. The red boards are SMT op amp inverting buffers, more info here.

Finished!  That's a messy module, but finally, it attenuverts.

OK, now that my strip board catastrophe works, the attenuvaterization--I doubt there is such a word--is satisfying. Onward! I am not done with center tap pots by any means!

Update 9-7-19 PCB of this same design is back, stuffed, and works!  Post is here.

Until next time, don't ehtaerb the semuf's.

3.5mm Breakout Board--No More Sequencer Flipping!

Hello again! I don't work for these guys and here's a plug for what I think is a very good and affordable (not DIY) sequencer:

It's an Arturia Beatstep Pro. I have used all sorts of sequencers, from cheesy/crappy/cheap to homemade to buggy to the really high end ones, and I go back to the Beatstep, it's extremely affordable for what you get, surprisingly well made, and has best of all, has awesomely musical "swing"settings.  Does it do everything you can think of? Of course not. But for $250 or so USD new in the box, it's a damn amazing bit of kit.

So what is so DIY about this? (Hello?)  Nothing yet--Go ahead--build a better sequencer for $250--when you do let me know and I will most-definitely post it.

By George no sequencer has everything! Not a feature, a bug: all the Beatstep Pro's 3.5" jacks are all on the back. That makes plugging this sequencer into other modules, at least in my rack, a bit of a pain--lift it up, turn things over, plug in your patch cables, wiggle the cable to see if it's in all the way, etc.

DIY to the rescue!

To connect the front TS to back, solder jumpers in the box in the middle. The remaining pads are for whatever else I might think up for this PCB....

The PCBs used in my prototype are super simple--it's 10x Switchcraft 35RAP2CAV 3.5" PCB mounted jacks mounted end to end, 5 per side. Two PCBs make 10 front to back connections good to go, ready to plug into whatever 3.5 gizmo you have in your rack, for easy front panel access.

Note that I had to create the eagle device for 35RAP2CAV for this (how to do create new parts in Eagle is posted here), I couldn't find it on the net, and it worked. Anyone interested? I am happy to get you the Eagle part description. Comment below.

The 35RAP2CAV is a useful jack for all sorts of DIY, solidly built, not too expensive--I find myself using them more and more. The jack has a switch built in, which is wired up on my breakout board, but not used in this application.

For my Beatstep Breakout board: here is what I came up with so far:

The front panel, which now has p touch labels, will be, after a shakeout and some more noodling, replaced by a 2mm thick frac panel from Front Panel Express.

Cables used to connect from the back of this panel to the sequencer are 6' Euro color thin patch cables, I bought them from Modular Addict, here.

The only hitch, to get everything to fit I had to Dremel off about 1/4" from the front of the PCB.  Oh well.  Maybe next run I'll fix this, but it wasn't hard to just cut off a bit of the PCB. UPDATE: easy fix. Change the Eagle's DRC rules to match JLCPCB's requirements. Turns out Eagle default DRC is much more conservative about how close a trace can be to the edge of a PCB vs. what JLCPCB supports. I figure a lot of other PCB makers are the same. 

Beyond that, this is another "Simple as it can be" sort of project.

UPDATE 9-26-19 I created another version of the same board, with 3x jacks per side instead of 5x. Since I have 6 more cables to run for this project.  Why not?  

You can get Eagle files, PDFs etc. for the breakout board on my website, go here. If you modify it (use different jacks, more jacks, less jacks, whatever) please let me know in the comments below. I will probably cook up variations myself and post more down the road.

OK back to the studio! Now that this breakout panel is mounted to my frac case I can get clocks, CV's etc quickly, no more having to flip the sequencer around! Yeh!

Electronotes Sample-Hold Modded with SMT

Continuing from last time--it's time to keep holding my nose and fab using SMT (surface mount technology).  It's not 1980 any longer.../

This time I take a classic Electronotes preferred circuit "SH-2" (EN#61, posted online here) designed by legendary Cornell Professor Bernie Hutchins and add two of the SMT op amp boards-- information here--to make the module more compatible with my setup.

I initially laid out the PCB and built this S/H module in 2017. I believe the design to be 35+ years old--all analog. I am impressed how flexible this S/H is, you can sample pretty much anything in the audio or control voltage realm, run very fast clocks into it and get good sonic results. 

Another great Electronotes design. You can get the original schematic here or buy the book; I highly recommend Electronotes Preferred Circuits and the entire Electronotes package to any synth DIY'er, it can be a source of a lot of ideas.

My somewhat simplified version of the Bernie S/H PCB worked first time, but was a major issue interfacing it to my modular DIY rig: for external clock, as I initially laid the circuit: only clock signals going a few volts below ground would tell the circuit to sample. 

But: almost all my clock generators go 0V to 5V or more, not 0V to -5V or below.

Lots of ways to fix this; for me, it was easily corrected with a familiar op amp inverter:

Two stage op amp inverter turns positive going clocks to negative--INV GATE OUT feeds the circuit's clock input, while second stage OUT could be brought to the front panel.

I also wanted to add a bipolar LED to indicate if I was using external or internal clock and have it pulse for each sample held. I used a second SMT op amp proof of concept PCB from last time:

A second 2-stage op amp daughter board provides a bi-color LED indicator for the module.  It's in series with the inverter already discussed.

For both boards I tweaked the 2 100K trims until the LED colors looked the way I wanted.  For internal: bright green, for external flashing red.  Yeh!

So there it is: the main PCB (Green); the two SMT op amp daughter boards are the red ones on the back.

Only the op amps are SMT, I am still a bit chicken to go all in with SMT! 

And even for the IC, I could have used PDIP I guess, but this mod would have been harder; the boards need to be small to fit the footprint of a 1U frac.

OK that's it, it was a fun morning modding this board and it made a really useful and reliable S/H even better. Not sure where the SMT thing is going to go right now but I'll think about it.

See ya next time!

Getting Started with SMD

 As my eyesight gets worse, the parts I use for DIY get smaller.  

Surface mount devices ("SMD") have become ubiquitous in electronics, along with SMT components (SMT: "surface mount technology), and perhaps an impending desire to DIY in the Eurorack format, meant it was time to tool up and solder my first SMT parts.

First off, I needed to be able to see what I was doing, so I bought a microscope used for SMT/SMD work and rework:

There are many 'scopes to choose so picking one was hard. After some research, I decided to go with AmScope and ultimately the scope recommended by this youtube dude--find it on Amazon, here.

(Apparently the YouTube repair dude makes some sort of commission? Fine with me. He makes funny, acerbic videos, and has a great NY accent and I enjoy his New York/New Jersey screw-you attitude).

Also, you will need the microscope light (the scope does not come with one but it's a requirement), a Barlow Lens, and eyepiece eye shields.  And of course: appropriate fine gauge solder, a good soldering iron, tweezers, flux and most all the rest of the stuff you'd use with through-hole. 

Go to the web page here for links to a lot of what you'll need.

The microscope works great....there were no instructions included about setting up the stand; I followed the photos from Amazon; it was a puzzle but ultimately figured it out. 

OK I had a microscope--and bought extra flux and some fine point tips for my soldering iron. 

What to build?  

From Tayda I bought SOIC op amps, then got some Eagle boards fab'd for proof of concept: a single SMD op amp buffer--can't get much easier than this?

 tiny TL072s.....

Here's the Proof of concept board:

Use 100K resistors for R1-R4 for higher impedance at input.....

So how did it go? Turns out building this board, with the microscope, was easy.  I knew nothing about soldering SMT so I followed the tutorial here. I made a few solder mistakes but as per the tutorial it's easily cleaned out and fixed up with solder wick. 

In the end I whipped up 4 boards:

And then built one out enough to test that a bipolar LED works.  It does!  

Input -5V relative to ground: blue

And 5V relative to ground--red.  Works!

UPDATE 7-13-19: to further shake out this SMT op amp board I modded my trusty Electronotes sample and hold using two of these SMD PCB's, more in this post.

Onward!

As with many things in life, this was all much easier than I thought; plunking down the dough for the Microscope helped a lot, although it was a pretty big investment.  But, this would have been hard to do without it. Update: I have found I don't always need a microscope for SOIC IC's, and/or 1206 sized passive components, but for smaller footprints the tools I bought for SMD work have been a lifesaver. Recommended!

3x Passive Audio Attenuator: One Hour Build!

Time for another easy one, and maybe my shortest AudiodiWHY post to date, which may not be a bad thing? Simple Passive Attenuator.

You can build something like it out of junk parts, but it might get used a lot!

No decal--skipping straight to FPE finished module looks like this:

I needed this module because I have gotten into Eurorack recently  and there seems to be not a whole lot of consistency in output P/P voltages. Some of them output (say) 2V P/P while for others it's about 5 or 7 or 10V P/P.

Maybe that "hot" output signal needs to be turned down so the next module doesn't distort--since we know it's never cool to smoke Doepfer. But the good news: it's easy to attenuate them hot signals using something like this:

I built this up out of junk parts and an "alubase" panel I had leftover from a PCBWAY order.

Here's the obligatory photo of the back:

Another bonus: I am a rare but devoted Frac guy, and Frac power supplies can get a bit over sized; they can stick out into the module next door when you beef 'em up, which you usually need to do. Putting a passive panel, with no PCB sticking out the back, next to the Frac's "wing" power supply keeps things from shorting out. Thank goodness!

Not much more to say here except it's fun to think up passive modules--i.e., no need for DC power. Can a Low pass gate be passive?  Yep. Can a distortion module be passive?  Yes--check out the previous post here.

Hours of fun, maybe not? but an hour of fun?  yep.

OK it took me less time to write this post than build this module but not much. Again maybe not a bad thing. See ya next time.