As usual, when you don’t hear from us, we’re cooking up new stuff. Here’s the assembly video for the version 4.0 circuit board.
The main new features of version 4 are:
* changed form factor to accommodate being able to be placed in a new case that I’ve sourced.
* added a parameter record button. This is going to be awesome, so more info will come when we’ve been able to bake the sequencer more for this feature.
* improved the placement of the arduino mega so that the USB port is closer to the edge of the board
* improved all of the hole sizes for the LED tact buttons
* when I though to, I added secondary holes for potentiometers in case you ever need that.
* added a small prototyping area for ad-hoc needs.
* hardwired the mode button LEDs up to 5V so that they’re on all the time, which freed up three pins on the arduino. One of those was used for the parameter record button
* TWO UNUSED PINS. They’re digital in, and PWM out. You could put two more buttons on here, or switches, or LEDs… or serial devices and drive input/output with softwareserial in the arduino code. You could, in theory, add two more LCD screens using the moderndevice.com driver boards or similar serial input display drivers. All kinds of things. Oh, Maybe you want to add a couple of midi ports? Hmm!
* generally labeled a lot of things on the board so you know what you’re looking at.
* had to rewire an awful lot of stuff to make the autorouter happy. So consequently, the firmware has changed somewhat significantly. I don’t exactly know what the right method is going to be to keep the 3.x units up to date, but we’ll get something figured out.
known problems:
* one of the buttons needs a jumper wire to ground. I’ll certainly get that fixed next time I order boards, but it’s an extremely minimal bug fix to perform.