Miniwave finished and working
2001-12-31 by J. Larry Hendry
I just finished my Blacet / Wiard Miniwave converted to the MOTM format and fired it up. Wow! Everything worked right off the bad except one LED was bad. That was an easy fix. :) I have some observations: 1. I must say this is an impressive piece of hardware. Great job Grant and John on a fine module. I have only one, but I can see that I will absolutely have to have another. 2. Calibration of the input trimmers for "span" and "offset" is fairly critical, but was very easy to dial in perfectly in short order with an oscilloscope. I really do not possibly see how that calibration can be done properly without a scope. 3. I have a WAV that I think would be great in the Miniwave. It is sine waves harmonically added together like a Hammond so that you can get that "organ sound" stacked oscillator sound from one device. Anyone interested in including it in any EPROM they are working on? It seems different than anything already in the "A" prom. 4. Bank and wave CV control requires a full 10 volts for full range. Since an attenuator is included in the package, I would have scaled the Minwave so that 5 volts of swing would have been plenty. The attenuator could be set to 50% for 10 volt swings. This seems like an easy modification. The actual resistor cannot be changed, because it is part of a network. But, if a 100K resistor is tacked across RN5 from pin 3 to 4 and another 100K across RN6 from pin 5 to 6, full sweeping would be possible from 5 volts swing with the attenuator set to 10. 5. This conversion from the Blacet to MOTM format is the most difficult project I have run into because so much advance thinking and re-engineering is required to make the package neatly fit the Stooge panel. However, I think a really good set of instructions will make this task MUCH easier. I have photographed my entire process. And, I am about 1/2 done with the written instructions. When complete, I will post this detailed set of assembly / conversion instructions to my website. 6 The silkscreen layout of Dave's for the Stooge panel requires one switch to have pin 1 at the top while the other must have pin 1 at the bottom. I will have all that detail in the instructions. Lastly, I will highly recommend this module to everyone. It is an exciting toy. Many kudos to John and Grant. Stooge Larry