Analogue-sequencer

forst of all sorry for taking up so much list bandwidth with my 
problems everyone..  Colin, if you would prefer, reply in private and 
we can continue in email.

Okay Colin, Ill check the caps and solder joints tomorrow.. But until 
then, heres more new fun weirdness for you to chew on.
  I tried it again an hour ago, after a few hours turned off.  After 
two unsucessful boots, the third was indeed a charm.  It turned on and 
played along merrily.  I didnt dare try again with PAGE to check memory 
allocation.  Instead I went through the manual like I had wanted to 
earlier today.  But after a minute, strangeness ensued.  It started 
slowing down at every button press, like my Nintendo used to do when 
there were 20 or so moving objects on the screen.  After it had 
excecuted the command, it went back to scrolling leds.  But every 
button press - paging through menus, scrolling through modes, changing 
knob values etc, the machines leds would flicker and jump and I could 
see every character appearing one after the other on the PLED.  As if 
it was trying to process tons of info or something.  I even turned 
tempo way down, mclock off, mthru off, even with the machine stopped, 
it was still doing this.  With a playlist setup, it would flash leds 
and slowdown everytime the parts would change.  Finally after about an 
hour of slow yet grinning fun (not even daring to connect it to any 
midi modules yet - this is gonna be fun, eventually) I got to the end 
of the manual and read that F1+7 MUST be performed upon first powerup 
of a P3 kit.  Ha..  well, I didnt do this, could it have gotten its 
brain garbled? Note, put this in the build pages!

could it be some sort of power issue or clock issue?  I noticed some of 
the ceramic caps I recieved were 100v and thus a bit physically larger 
than maybe optimal?..  Its odd though because It seemed to work fine 
yesterday.. for a few minutes anyway.  I put my 9v, 600ma wallwart ono 
my bench and it measures 13v..  why cant they get these right?  Maybe 
my poor 7805 is burning up?  Maybe maybe maybe?

carry on.. thanks for any replies or ideas about this anyone!

~Steve


> 
> It sounds like there is something causing it to only boot up 
successfully
> for a short time.
> At a guess, I'd check the polarity of the electrolytic cap on the CPU 
reset
> pin - C3.
> That might cause the CPU to go into reset if it is the wrong way 
round.
> After that, check all component orientations and solder joints.
> 
> Cheers,
> Colin f