Saturday, June 30, 2012

Polysix finally gets MIDIfied

After a long wait, the Polysix has gotten the CHD Elektroservice MIDI retrofit kit installed! :)

Actually, I installed it a couple of days after installing the Poly-61 kit.

However, I couldn't get this Polysix kit to work straight away!
Knowing that my Polysix has had some problems in the past, I wasn't sure what caused it.


Investigation

After trying to check the keyboard scanning pins, I concluded that there must be something wrong with the MIDI board.
It seemed like it was sporadically triggering notes and sometimes just hanging.
I wanted to see if the clock was running but it's hard to check on a crystal if you only have cheapo probes and a 5MHz USB scope...

I emailed the guys at CHD Elektroservis and after a while they suggested I should send the board back to them. Once they had received it they said they found that the crystal wasn't functioning properly. Hah!

They fixed it, sent it back to me and I installed it.
It worked perfectly!
Ok, I haven't tested arpeggiator sync yet, but at least the keyboard and MIDI works :)

Here are a couple of photos.
In this one you can see the small CHD kit, basically intercepting the keyboard signals and injecting triggers on the keyboard bus when it receives MIDI data.
And the MIDI jack :)

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