at the distance of probably a couple of hundred miles you spotted without a picture that I had indeed put a 595 in the U12 socket where a 165 should have lived. This is the problem with clueless noobs thinking they can man up and self-source....
Fortunately thanks to the sage advice of Shruthizens (TM) on builds gone by, I had a few spare shift register chips stashed in my electronics box (in fact it's a motto at work as well - "never just bring one"....) - so I whacked a spare 165 in and chaselights are running!!!
I knew it wasn't a solder point!
Plus one of my "commitments" today was having some people round for beer and samosas and one of them is an electrical engineer & he told me it was highly unlikely I'd fried any chips by a little bit of reflowing. So I knew there was something else going on...
Anyway - thanks very much, I will get back on the standard non-remedial instructions and solder the display etc etc ... one LXR-7 is on the way to completion thanks to your patient advice...
I had swapped U11 and U12 - so after i put in the 165 and it almost fixed things, I went through checking all the chips and sure enough somewhere else I had made the reverse swap. So LXR-7 Birmingham edition is up and running! Now where are my headphones...
I have played with my LXR for a few days now and its really a wonderful little machine! Like it a lot!
A few thoughts:
Hardware
1. Already mentioned above: LEDs for voice selection is to tight to the tactile switch.
2. I ordered standard metal film resistors from mouser and they are about 1 millimeter wider than the footprint on the PCB. Sometimes it was quite tedious to make them fit nicely. And the large amount of resistors made the build take a bit longer than expected. Not a big problem but worth to mention.
3. Headphone jack would have been nice. For couch drumming.
Software bugs firmware 0.15
1. Nice to see the graphic display glitches are gone but I still have a small one when pressing the "step" button.
2. When in sound load dialogue and turning encoder clockwise and the rapidly counter clockwise you end up in preset number 240-250. No way to scroll clockwise back to 0 but you need to go counterclockwise back to low numbers.
3. When in PLAY pressing PERF and then after a while press SHIFT I loose my sequence position led. No way to recall except for reboot? Am I missing a feature or is this a bug?
That was all for now! Thank you Julian for a great machine!
1. Nice to see the graphic display glitches are gone but I still have a small one when pressing the "step" button.
added to the list.
2. When in sound load dialogue and turning encoder clockwise and the rapidly counter clockwise you end up in preset number 240-250. No way to scroll clockwise back to 0 but you need to go counterclockwise back to low numbers.
confirmed. added to buglist
3. When in PLAY pressing PERF and then after a while press SHIFT I loose my sequence position led. No way to recall except for reboot? Am I missing a feature or is this a bug?
this is a bug. but there is a hidden feature to reset the LED. In perf. mode holding donw shift is used to access the pattern options screen, but also to change the visible/editable pattern.
somehow the viewed pattern data seems to get corrupted when shift is pressed. but holding down shift, then pressing the select button 1 (or whatever pattern is active at the moment) fixes the problem without reboot.
Also changing the playing pattern while follow mode is active in the global settings menu should bring the missing LED back.
will be fixed in the next version.
That was all for now! Thank you Julian for a great machine!
I had the chance of playing the unit a bit yesterday.
I've also opened the manual, although i did nothing fancy yesterday (drum sound editing, microsteps, and that's all). I purposely did not read the manual, but just tried to find quickly the informations i wanted at a glance. This is the way your customers are going to use the manual anyway.
I had some glitches with buttons making nothing (I had to press them 2 times) and some bounces sometimes. To me, it looks a bit like you set the debouncing parameters for your previous type of push buttons, and that they are not perfectly suited to the TL1100s. No worry, this was a minor annoyance.
One thing that I don't like on the UI is the way you access parameters on a page where there are more than 4 parameters (for instance, on the Mod page, where there are 7 parameters). You have to use the encoder for accessing the 2nd part of parameters. I believe that something more mutable-alike, like pressing the button a second time to access the 2nd page, would be way more efficient.
The organization on the menus may be improved as well. For instance, again on the mod page, for a kick, the 3 parameters are about "standard" modulation, then the 3 following parameters are about velocity modulation. It would make more sense if the velocity control and the standard controls would be each on one page.
I believe that there is room for factorization in both the UI and the manual.
In the manual, I think that there are no differences in the Filter, LFO, Transient and Mixer page, whatever the drum type is. You should just state it and explain it at the beginning of the "drum type" section, then just detail what differs for each drum type. This would make the manual shorter, easier to edit and probably easier to read.
I'm not really sure if it's a good idea, but to me, one good way to handle several types of drum types would be to select which kind of drum type you want on the OSC page. Then, the menus would be exactly the same whatever the drumtype is, but you would have some "X" or some "-" displayed when the parameter cannot be edited due to the drumtype selected. IMO, this would make the UI way more consistent, and thus would make the learning curve even faster.
Regarding the manual, some "screenshots" of the interface would help. For instance, in section 4.7.1, you may have to read several times the manual or to experiment for knowing how to display the parameters. A capture of which buttons are used here would help.
PS : ok I just watched the "firmware suggestions" thread and shiftr has already advised the 2nd button press thing
One thing that I don't like on the UI is the way you access parameters on a page where there are more than 4 parameters (for instance, on the Mod page, where there are 7 parameters). You have to use the encoder for accessing the 2nd part of parameters. I believe that something more mutable-alike, like pressing the button a second time to access the 2nd page, would be way more efficient.
The organization on the menus may be improved as well. For instance, again on the mod page, for a kick, the 3 parameters are about "standard" modulation, then the 3 following parameters are about velocity modulation. It would make more sense if the velocity control and the standard controls would be each on one page.
toggle with 2nd keypress has been added in the latest firmware. I don't know which version you've got, but in the latest firmware the 3 parameters on the mod page have their dedicated page (3 on first, 3 on second)
I also noticed i have to press buttons twice... i thought it might have to do with using them without the switch caps. But they do give a click so i might have to do with debouncing. Also the pots are to sensitive sometimes with values flickering between 2 states.
regarding the button debouncing: - is this happening on all buttons or just the 16 sequencer buttons? - does it only happen when you press multiple buttons?
It could be due to the step parameter recording mode (holding down a step button and tweak a parameter to record it). There is still a bug with the timer measuring the button down time, as it only supports 1 button at the moment. So pressing 2 step buttons at once won't work.
I would probably run this with an external kick drum, the LXR kick as counterpoint, the cymbals which are very nice & crispy especially with sample rate reduction....and three or four FM voices, the one on board sounds so good (and been a long time since that Yamaha thing I always wanted is it D200? and your sequencer is definitely better!)
FM FTW!
Buttons did seem a little insensitive to me too. I will be down for a programmer whenever it appears too as you have so many parameters to control, the design is lovely and compact and there were always gong to be issues with ease of access to parameters but at least they are there! The LFO control is great too as can access them in a way without dedicated button.
So I'm finished! Everything seems to be working great...however, the screen becomes un-responsive (frozen then just random crazy characters) after a short while. Any thoughts? I had issues with the 16 pin header and decided to just individually solder the pins without the plastic header but I figured the screen would either work or not...
UPDATE: once I took it out of my lap and put it on a flat surface, the screen issues seemed to stop....I'm sure that an enclosure would make this a non-issue
I'm in the middle of a jam using my anushri as a midi-clock and kick, snare and hihat trigger source.
Firmware is updated from yesterday (0.15).
I try to trigger kick, snare and hihats drum elements using the drum knobs on the anushri, while playing sequences on the LXR. I use a midipal in between (I wired it first to modify the channel, since the manual indicates that only channel one is recognized, but the midi IN channel selection seems to have been added since), but I don't believe that it makes any difference.
So far, both synth are able to speak to each other. I can synchronize them both, turn the tempo knob on the anushri and have the LXR answering. I can start and stop both sequencers (anushri and LXR) using the anushri's start/stop button.
There are several issues though :
- there is a small delay between the anushri and the LXR sequencer (the LXR sequencers are late). For instance, when i setup a four on the floor pattern for the kick on the LXR, and add some kick probability on the Anushri, i can hear 2 distinctive kick sounds when they are supposed to play together. It means that the LXR is playing the midi note, then is playing its own sequenced note. The thing is that the slower the tempo, the longer the delay between both notes is. It looks like the LXR is missing the first midi clock signal, or like it's waiting one additionnal midi clock compared to the anushri.
I may try to see what happens with my other (few) midi-clock synchronzed gear, like my midiseq v4l,
- when modifying the tempo on the anushri while playing live, especially if I change it quickly, the LXR sometimes completely looses its synchronization. The aforementioned problem gets worse and timing becomes very wrong afterwards.
- on the LXR, the "default" snare part is assigned to note D2#, while on the anushri it's assigned to D2. I don't know if it's possible to modify it on the LXR since the last firmware changes (it's not on the anushri, unless you modify the code).
I don't know to what extent those problems are usual regarding midi-clocks. I don't really know either if Olivier has implemented the midi-clock norm the right way (i suppose so?), but my take would be to have the anushri and the LXR complying as well as possible, since they are largely addressed to the same audience.
I experienced some digital clipping yesterday when using a lot of parts. Given the output level, it doesn't seem to be related to my soundcard (used as a mixer), but to the LXR.
with the latest firmware? coul be due to increased noise and transient levels. I will check this.
okay, I will look into this. So far I tested the slave mode with the PC most of the time, where it is hard to tell leg due to audio latency I added it to the buglist. Hopefully I will get most of this fixed on tomorrows bank holliday
Comments
Congratulations on the build!
I hope you enjoy the machine!
Now If i only had some of your tasty samosas
In perf. mode holding donw shift is used to access the pattern options screen, but also to change the visible/editable pattern.
somehow the viewed pattern data seems to get corrupted when shift is pressed.
but holding down shift, then pressing the select button 1 (or whatever pattern is active at the moment) fixes the problem without reboot.
Also changing the playing pattern while follow mode is active in the global settings menu should bring the missing LED back.
will be fixed in the next version.
I don't know which version you've got, but in the latest firmware the 3 parameters on the mod page have their dedicated page (3 on first, 3 on second)
At the moment the manual is more or less in a brainstorming state.
Most of it was written while developing.
I still have to regroup and rewrite a lot of the sections.
At the moment some information is still scattered around different chapters, too.
- is this happening on all buttons or just the 16 sequencer buttons?
- does it only happen when you press multiple buttons?
It could be due to the step parameter recording mode (holding down a step button and tweak a parameter to record it). There is still a bug with the timer measuring the button down time, as it only supports 1 button at the moment. So pressing 2 step buttons at once won't work.
latest firmware including changelogs can always be found here
fcd72 suggested laser cut cardboard isolators between the display and the pcb. maybe worth a try.
So far I tested the slave mode with the PC most of the time, where it is hard to tell leg due to audio latency
I added it to the buglist.
Hopefully I will get most of this fixed on tomorrows bank holliday