First Feedback & build hints

Mesmerised

Yay! Today the new LXR is finally clobbering nicely away...

At first building was smooth. Some comments:

* I wasn't sure if I was to bridge R51 or just leave it out. --> OLED users should just leave R51 and VR1 empty.

* Aligning the LEDs indeed needs some work. I solved this by mounting the front plate after putting in all LEDs but not soldering them yet. After turning around, the LEDs align nicely to the glass and then I soldered one leg, checked they were really straight and then soldered the other leg. Looks nice!

* I would have chosen better quality IC sockets. These ones tend to become unreliable with age in my experience.

* I had to glue on all the buttons, they wouldn't stick at all by themselves.

* The rear backplane of the case gave me a bit of trouble: The position of the hole for the power jack is about one millimeter too far to the inside. The thickness of the glass was too much or the detents for the notches on the upper and lower case plates didn't go deep enough so the backplate would stand too far out. This needed some careful filing.

* It is a good idea to loosen the screws again after checking positions and rebuilding the case from bottom up on a flat surface. Before that I had a somewhat skewed case that wouldn't stand flat.

* All parts were fine, I have a surplus double row pin header  - was this supposed to be for the extension ports? As there's no extensions yet, I left it out.

After building the machine I had some frustration to go through as it did some weird stuff. All LEDs and Keys/Encoders seemed to work but strange noises came out and some menues looked very weird. Also I could not use the SD Card and the bootloader would give SD Error.

So - no victory candy for me yesterday. :-/

But today I checked with Julian and now everything works very nice! :-D

Obviously the choice of SD Card is tricky. I had tried three different ones and the LXR hates them all. But today a new 8GB SDHC (Sandisk Extreme) stolen from my digital camera did the trick. The firmware update ran fine and now this thing rocks!

Yay! Victory candy! (very nice, folks - I remember these "cracklers" from my childhood. :-D)

So, now I started checking out this machine and it's indeed very good! \:D/

The possible variations in sound amaze me. I particularly like the LFO, the morph feature (great fun!), the step probability and the sound quality in general. Ah, performance mode is nice too (I liked that on my EMX) - you can even record your drum rolls on the fly, great!

And I like the groove, seems to be very precise!

Bugs: =:)

I noticed that the screensaver sometimes sneaks back in for a sec right after I turned knobs. Seems like a bug but not annoying.

Had the machine stuck once at "loading pattern".

Sometimes the display is empty after switching modes. Switching back and forth once more solves this.

Here comes my first suggestion for future updates:

* I'd like to have a "performance" file type that saves the state of the whole machine in one go. It should include sound, pattern set, settings and morph sound. Maybe define a "default" performance to load on power up?

It would be an important thing for live stage situations since losing power on the LXR makes you need to load everything again.

Thank you for this inspiring machine & I'm very much looking forward for what else is about to come (I'd like the sequencer out mode to run external gear)

best regards, 

Mesmerised