Elektron Musical Instruments

On Sun, 14 May 2000, Saul Goode wrote:

>   i have the new o.s. and the knobs still fluctuate, which really sucks. in 
> the old o.s. they didn't go all the way to 127, but they didn't jump. in the 
> new o.s. they do go to 127 but switch around to 125, 126 and 127 which is 
> kinda worse, cuz if you programming, your values may jump. this is because 
> the dctrl knobs are all the way up, so make sure that they're not up all the 
> way.

Ouch - doesn't sound good. I knew there was a risk with the improving the
end value accuracy - but in my tests I did not get the fluctuation. It can
differ on some units - and depending on how the problem exactly appears
there might be something we can do about it. Is all knobs affected, or is
it mainly one of them?

>   but i have a lot of faith in elektron, and i'm sure all these 
> short-comings will be addressed.

It is very hard to make the direct controllers 100% stable for all units.
We use the A/D-converters inside the HC11 microcontroller to decode them,
and the values I get from these are not stable at all. From an 8-bit value
they vary as much as 8 steps up and down, and to get them to the stability
they are now involves a lot of massaging and filtering. We've tried many
different approaches to make it better, but haven't succeeded. The problem
is that the fluctuation is not purely quick ones around a stable middle
value, but also sometimes a bit slower. When we've tried to filter these
out the responce have been slower which is not good as well.

Right now I'm using a middle value algorithm together with a "pithole"
around the last accepted value. Ideas to improve the algorithm are
welcome! :)

 //Daniel