First thanks again to Thorsten (and the other who helped him in any way) to make this midibox possible.
Here are some pictures of my Midibox FM.
I find pictures blogs very interesting and some of them very usefull to build my midibox. I like thinking this one may be usefull for some.
All Parts are working. I played a little (without box it’s not as fun as with) with the matrix and the 4 controlers and that made many controls very quickly reachable… This matrix is a very good idea.
I add a 5th DIN to have the 4 OP and 4 Instruments buttons available independently.
One wall adapter without the plastic (8,2V 600mA) and one made from Throsten pdf…
The transformer is a 2x15V AC that’s why i put a 7915 and a 7815 before the 7912 and 7812. I dont know exaclty the consequences of that but that works. (The 7912 refused to work without.. The input voltage is about 26V DC when no current is produced).
First the core, the 4x20 LCD and the back side connections to the Opl3 module.
The Opl3 Module…
the DIN4, DOUT4 and the additionnal DIN and the bank eeproms.
The 3rd DOUT has the ouput connector to the matrix rows.
The Matrix :
The Operators/instruments selector :
The 8 select button, escape, config and main encoder.
The 4 encoders :
Now i have to build the box… I’m afraid the matrix will be hard to put inside…
Here is the final control surface before lazertran transfer.
To clean the 3mm and 4mm wholes, i used my drilling machine with a 9mm screw (not sure about the word), and i drill very slowly and carefully just to remove the dirty aluminium surplus around the wholes… (I pushed harder on the wholes for the screw to make a kind of screw shape appear). It worked rather well.
(Sorry for my foot… :-[ ;D )
Waiting for the varnish to dry on the surface and for the paint to dry on the case.
(Next time i will use varnish spray… My brush was to big and leave some very little bubbles and some print.)
Here is the control surface.
I cut the lazertran to make the whole between the 2 coats of varnish…
The paper was hard enough to be cut propely and the second coat make every thing looks cleaner.
And the whole set…
I’m waiting for some 2,5mm screw to be able to fix the LCD.
I now have to drill the case and screw all the PCBs inside (and may be fill the 2 empty 24C256 places.)
with that screen, did you have to do any software changes to mios?
No change at all !
Line 1&3 corresponds to line 1 of a 2x40 LCD.
Line 2&4 to line 2.
I may try to change something but i’m afraid that will not be simple :
It is that when you scroll the menu with the main encoder all the screen scrolls and it’s weird… It would be much nicer to have only the second line scrolling.
The main page also is weird with the ‘|’ at the end of the first line (you can see it in the first post) … Removing this “|” and putting 2 spaces instead of 1 between the instruments would be nicer.
perhaps if only the bottom line was to scroll, the select buttons would no longer correspond to the top line, as mios would know what their functions are at that particular point, but you wouldn’t because it would be frozen.
Hey… I’m glad and proud to see my midibox here… thanks Thorsten. ;D
There seem to be very few Midibox FM compare to SID… Too bad…
In fact the 4x20 LCD works rather well.
The 2 rows of 4 buttons bellow the LCD is intuitive. no problem to find immediatly which button to press.
The more weird is the scrolling of parameters with the first menu of the second line which become the 4th of the first line when you scroll right…etc… difficult to get used to.
Concerning the main page “Instrument view” is not nice but “full view” (see CFGmenu) is really perfect…
