October 07, 2007
M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 MIDI Repair
I recently had to take apart my new-to-me M-Audio Keystation Pro 88 keyboard controller. The MIDI Out port had flaked out. I bought it as a floor display and I think the MIDI cords got yanked out of the back more than once which resulted in broken solder joints. I've used it for a while as is, but the plug always felt loose and I wasn't surprised when it went totally Tango Uniform on me. So I busted out my screw driver, multimeter, and soldering iron to effect a repair of the MIDI jack.
When it came to dismantling the board, it looked fairly straightforward to me, but I searched online to see if there was any guidance to be had. I didn't find any, so I decided to take some photos along the way and post this little write-up in case any one wanted to follow in my footsteps. WARNING: I am not an electronics expert by any stretch. I'm just a guy who likes to take broken things apart and fix them if he can. I get lucky and occasionally things work the same or better after I put them back together, but follow this guidance at your own risk. If you have any doubts, take your board to some one with experience and/or insurance.
1) To work on the keyboard, I took it off its stand and placed it on the floor. I tipped it to that the back of the board (with the ports and power switch) was facing upwards. On my carpeting, it would rest like this on its own, apparently with no pressure on the keys, but I didn't trust it to stand on its own and kept a hand on it while it was propped up thusly.
2) The back of the board is made up of one continuous plate of metal. To remove it, I removed all of the screws on both the back and bottom of the board that attach the metal plate to the frame. Note that on my board, the screws on back had little clear plastic washers presumably to protect the finish of the board. I kept an eye on those so I wouldn't lose them. Also note, NO OTHER SCREWS NEEDED TO BE REMOVED! Just the ones holding the metal plate down from the outside.
3) Once all of the screws were removed, I took a while to figure out how the plate came off because it was still held in fairly tightly. I was trying to open the back panel up by lifting up from the bottom of it, but this didn't get me any where. The trick was to use a broad putty knife and pry up at the back plate from one end of the board. The plate has 90 degree bends at both the top and bottom that fit tightly into the frame of the board, so it has to be lifted straight out of those tracks.
4) I found that once the panel was loose, tipping it 'bottom forward' while looking at the bottom of the board was the best way to get at the ribbon cable connectors. There wasn't a lot of room on these ribbon cables, so I was careful not to over stress them and kept the back plate as close to the board as I could. I believe all of the connectors are unique, but it's always a good idea to label or at least photograph them before removal.
5) Once I removed all of the connecting wires, I removed the 8 screws holding the the circuit board to the back plate.
6) After using my multimeter to confirm that the jack itself was still good - the solder joints were just broken, I resoldered the jack to the board, tested the connections with a MIDI cable and my multimeter and put everything back together.
Note: The one tricky bit I found when reassembling everything was that the power and USB jacks did not want to fit nicely through their cutouts on the back plate. I cranked down the screws before I realized this and risked screwing up those jacks while repairing the MIDI. I removed the board one more time, made sure everything was seated properly, and THEN screwed the back plate back down.
That's it! As easy as 1-2-6, I fixed my MIDI controller. If not for my recent Brain Machine project and my first experience soldering on a Printed Circuit Board, I don't know if I'd have had the guts to attempt this repair, but it was really not a big deal when all was said and done. The toughest part is that the board weighs nearly 50#. I could have hurt my back getting it off and back on the stand :)
I hope this helps some one out there who needs to crack the case on his/her board. If you have any questions, let me know: oblivion at ratula dot net.
September 02, 2007
From Linux to Flickr
So I have a minor ass-ton of photos on my olde web server from before I put everything on Flickr. Most of them are sitting in an old OLD version of Gallery that's been getting pounded by spam comments. I finally decided to pull the plug on Gallery, but I want to migrate the photos to flickr.
The problem, however, is that there is not an official uploader for linux. I could zip up the files and move them to a windows box (or put them on a Samba share my laptop could get to), but I decided to be a bit mroe direct and remembered that flickr accepts uploads via e-mail.
I noodled out this little script to do the deed for me:
for i in `find -name '*.jpg' |grep -v '\.sized\.' |grep -v '\.thumb\.' |grep -v '\.highlight\.' |cut -f2 -d'/' `
do echo $i
uuencode $i $i | mail -s "$i tags: tag tags more.tags from.gallery" {my_upload_address}@photos.flickr.com
done
Sweet.
The only problem is that after getting to the albums of my shots from my Canon Digital Rebel, I've realized that I need a 'sleep' statement in there to let the mail servers/interweb tubes cool off a bit :)
Hack hack hack.
August 30, 2007
Hacking, the Legal Kind
First off, let me acknowledge - long time, no blog/podcast. You know the excuses. Topic closed.
Re: the subject of this post, it's not so much hacking (yet) as kit-building, but I just bought a MiniPOV 3 kit in order to make Mitch Altman's Brain Machine. I remember seeing "Brain Wave Machines" or "Hypnosis Machines" at Sharper Image stores in the malls back in the 80s, and I've always been into altering my mind without drugs (I once stayed up so late looking at the fractal demo that came with my Cyrix 387 floating-point math coprocessor that I seriously mind-tripped and STILL remember the dream I had that nigh circa 1992) so this really caught my interest. I, of course, first heard about this project from the 2600 Off the Hook podcast (08/08/2007) from Chaos Communication Camp in Germany.
I've done some light soldering before, though never on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). This should be fun. I nearly dropped $60 on a new soldering iron and other tools, but decided to hold off on that until I see if my current iron is up to the task (perhaps with a new/hacked tip) and see if this phase lasts more than a few days.
If the brain machine project goes well, I just might step up to building a cool MIDI interface from the MIDIsense kit. That would be where the true hacking would begin. We'll see.
Wish me luck!
BTW, a little bird told me you can expect a new podcast soon. Really. I swear. Unless the recording didn't take this morning. . . .
P.S. Comments are still CLOSED. If you'd like to comment, please call my comment line, mail eblotheweblog at gmail, or catch me on IM/GTalk, etc. Thanks.
July 11, 2007
YouTube, Google, and Other Videos Sucked into iTunes
So, I recently found this Goolge code project called CastCluster. It's some digital form of liquid cool. It's a cross-platform java app and a bookmarklet with which you grab YouTube or Google videos (or producers) as well as any directory on your hard drive. The app. will stream the video, convert it to an ipod-able format, and give you an RSS feed which you can then dump
into iTunes (or I think any other local aggregator) and automatically suck
YT/Google/other videos onto a video iPod (which My Darling Rose now owns).
Here's the super-cool. I can feed it the directories on my MythTV box which
hold the recordings. So now MythTV shows could also get automagically
pulled onto an iPod.
Pretty fargin' cool - if it works - I haven't seen the quality of a MythTV
import yet, but YouTube to iTunes on my laptop was decent. I'll test the rest tonight.
April 18, 2007
PC, TV, etc.
So last week I lost a huge post about the new PC and how that build went (thank you, Firefox!). Basically, it went well with the exception of one bad stick of RAM in the pair I bought. So I ordered a new pair and ran on one stick (1GB) until the replacement arrived and I RMA'd the bad stuff. Thank you Newegg.com.
The machine is running the SMP console client for Folding@Home. It's crunching along nicely and has helped halt and somewhat reverse my precipitous fall on Team DnD #53338. To really keep up, though, I really need a PS3. Maybe later this year. I've played a few games on the new box (Flight Sim X mostly) but haven't bought anything new for it yet. Thinking Madden '07, NHL '07, and maybe F.E.A.R. will be among the first purchases. I haven't done any recording or editing on it yet either, but soon.
One thing that did suck up a bunch of silly time last weekend was playing WinAmp visualizations on my other recent acquisition - a 61" TV. A friend's parents' were upgrading to High Def. from their 'lowly' Sony KP-61HS10, so I 'did them a favor,' by getting it out of the way very cheaply.
The cool thing is that this thing actually DOES do HD, if you have the right source. It doesn't have an HD tuner, but can display HD from one of the component inputs. And the vid card on the new computer? Puts out HD on the component outs :D So I was playing Flight Sim, Iron Aces, and WinAmp visualizations at 1080i. Text wasn't very sharp at all, but everything else was great. As for getting it home, a good friend helped move it. It was a challenge in that it only fit in the van by 1/8" and had to go in a very specific way. I had to lay it back for the trip, which worried me, but it thankfully survived intact. It now graces our living room until I get my ass around to finishing out the basement.
One MAJOR annoyance that happened last week is that Google-bot ATE ALL OF MY MYTHTV RECORDINGS (a la Spider of Doom)!!!!!! I'm not sure if I was more mad at Google, the MythTV package maintainers, or myself. What basically happened is this:
- A recent update to MythTV removed the .htaccess file I had in place to require passwords to get to the MythWeb interface to MythTV (the REALLY stupid thing is that the .htaccess file mine was replaced with WARNS that you should use authentication for just this reason, but DISABLES IT BY DEFAULT!!!!!).
- That or another update removed the robots.txt file I had in place to prevent spiders from crawling MythWeb OR I forgot to put one in place when I built this box (I know I had one on some install at some point).
- Googlebot came along and indexed MythWeb, which included hitting the links for deleting recordings.
- I got home to watch some TV, found 2 recordings, and flipped out.
- In researching what I thought was a hack of my system, I noticed apache still getting flooded with requests from Google-bot, so I shut down apache, fixes robots.txt and .htaccess and picked up the shattered pieces of my life.
Now you know. Grrrrrrr. BTW, the bot also seemed to hit some "Never Record" and "Record Later" links, because future scheduling was all borked, too. Oh, and it seems that all of that incoming traffic from Google-Bot was enough to piss off Comcast who decided to change my officially dynamic, but for all practical purposes, static IP address. GGGrrrrrrr!
Anyway, that's about all the time I have for catch-up right now.
I'm supposed to be jammin' tonight live on JVonD Radio, so check out JVonD.com for more info.
Later.
BTW, Firefox or MovableType tried to lose this post, too, but I was too clever for them and had done a copy to the clipboard before I clicked "Save." Let's try this again. Grrrrrrrrrrr.
