More power?

The MIDI interface needs a power supply between 8 and 35 volts. The supply current needs to be 15 mA for the interface itself plus whatever is drawn by the output loads.

The loads are connected to a common positive supply switched to ground by the darlington pair drivers.

If the driver voltage is 15V I'd need the 24V rated Coto reed relay which has a coil resistance of 2KOhm. That would be a current draw of (15 / 2000) 7.5 mA each. Assuming worst case of all 49 relays being on at once that would be approx 368 mA.

That's worst case but the question is this: Can the existing SS30 PSU be used to power the interface?

The SS30 PSU has a +15V rail (this is all carefully worked out, you understand) which is rated up to 500 mA. 

What's not clear, is how much of that 500mA is used by the SS30. I know that the +15V rail is not used for the K boards (-7V) or the G boards (all voltages are derived form the -26V rail) but it is used on the LF, OR and F boards. If the interface took the best part of 400mA (absolute maximum) is it likely the SS30 is using under 100mA?

I'm going to have to get the whole thing working and then measure the current on that rail before I can decide whether I need another power supply.

G Board Restoration

Here are the SS30's main PCBs.

It's about 50% wires!

G boards on the left, K, boards at the back and the rest in the middle. During the hiatus I'd cut out a piece of MDF to fit everything to.

I'd checked the power was okay so I decided to start with G boards and see if the oscillator and tone generator ICs were all working. It's a good place to start as all the sound originates there so anything else would be hard to test until they were verified. Also a faulty tone generator chip might be difficult to replace. Yamaha said they had spares when I got the service manual from them way back when, but would they still have these chips? I;d need to find out early on.

I took everything out of the case to gain access.

Don't worry, I've got a wiring guide.

I prodded the scope probes around the G2 board, which is the top most of the stack, and straight-away found that there was a problem. Only one of the tone generator chips was outputting anything. The other IC had no input clock. I wasn't surprised, a quick look around the G boards and I could see several wires that had worked loose at some point.

-26V and -9V supply rails broken on G4

 These wires were all easily fixed, although I did have to check a few more than once on the schematic and wiring diagrams. One group of wires in particular seemed to be linked in a circular fashion. I'm not even sure what they do - something to do with suppressing noise I guessed - so I decided to move on and come back to that mystery later.

I checked the traces again and was disappointed to find that there was still no output on the tone generator ICs. Now I was worried. Damaged ICs would slow things down and a potentially be expensive. However, I've spent enough time fixing electronics to know that you need to be careful not to just swap out an expensive IC because it's appears faulty.

By the way, the SH-101 I'm also fixing does seem to have a broken oscillator chip, but I double checked everything around before condemning it. When I get the replacement I'll still be nervous until it's in and working though.

I went all round the circuit and traced the problem back to the oscillator on the G3 board. There are two identical oscillators built from discrete components, one on G3 and one on G4. This is great as I could A/B compare them to see where the problem started. The first problem I had was using my scope! I was comparing two wave forms and getting one at the right the frequency (around 500KHz) and the other was... well it seemed to be beyond the range of the scope! It was already late, so I went to bed.

Spot the mistake? (the chocolate wrapper is not a clue)

The next evening I started again and got the same problem. This time I went through and systematically worked out that the scope was not showing me the right trace if both signals were connected. I'd got the trigger set-up incorrectly. In the picture above you can see that only channel A is being used as a trigger source. The oscillators are not synced so triggering one from the other gives the problem you can see in the photo.
Once I triggered each input off it's own signal I got two comparable traces. The night before I'd quickly ascertained that the signal from the G3 oscillator was DC shifted negatively by several volts. Having excluded any other issues I was sure this was the problem. It's supposed to be between 0 and -15V, so what was causing this anomaly?

G3 Oscillator being negative.

I eventually disconnected a cable - which I'd just reconnected - that feeds the clock from G3 to G4. Now the signal was biased correctly. So, it was something on the G4 board.

There's something

 When I was fixing that cable I'd noticed this capacitor on the underside of the G4 PCB. It was obviously a modification and didn't appear on the schematic. It also wasn't present in the same position on the G3 board (where the G4 clock enters that board). So, I took it off. Now everything worked perfectly. This cap was clearly an afterthought. It was pulling the signal too low and served no apparent purpose. I suspect that once everything is running I may find out what it was for, but that bridge can be crossed if I get to it.

Test Points 1 and 2 (A and B triggering!)

So, I could now see clean, strong signals from both of the first two test points on the schematic, indicating all was well with the oscillators.

The next job would be to reconnect the wires from K1 and K2 to G1 and G2.

Power-up

It's been an exciting couple of evenings (yes, that's how I roll) as I've had the actual SS30 hardware out and powered up for the first time in years.

I had done some work a few years back that didn't make it on to the blog. I had put the power supply into a temporary enclosure. It's never going to fit in the rack case so one day it'll get it's own, proper enclosure.

The original back-panel (upside down), power switch and lamp

 Which is a re-purposed carry box

Inside you can see everything looking good

 

 

Note the Japanese characters on the PCB.

 I checked all the rails and was relieved to see them all looking healthy

But what about the synth itself?

Switching negative voltages - Concluded?

Keep it simple

 Back in this post http://ss30m.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/how-are-you-to-switch-negative-voltages.html I was talking about the issues with switching negative voltages with the simplest circuitry possible.

The guy at J-Omega recommended opto-isolators and I like the sound of that but in the interests of trying to limit the number of pins and foot-print (can't we just use three pins and keep things small?) and the price (transistors are cheap!) what, if any, are the alternatives? Also, I don't know about you, but despite studying these blighters at university I can never quite remember the exact rules governing their use. In particular there are precious few examples with negative voltages and certain factors, that don't come up when everything is above the ground rail, were obscure to me.

Transistor biasing basics.

It seems almost counter-intuitive but you can't switch a negative-ground current with a positive-ground current. The problem is that to turn a transistor switch 'off' the gate (or base) voltage must be lower than the lower end of what you are switching. This is as well as having the 'on' voltage higher.
Normally switching a positive current to a ground is a doddle because your 'off' voltage is ground. No current flows (in enhancement type FETs, anyway) because there is in-effect no bias. When you apply a positive voltage the transistor is biased and the switch is 'on'.
With a negative current to switch the 'off' voltage has to be lower that the lowest voltage. In this case it will have to be lower than -7V (or thereabouts). Because the MIDI interface drivers use Darlington pairs which themselves are driven on from TTL logic levels there is no way to generate an off voltage that is less than 0V.

Previously I mentioned analogue switches which can (in some examples) do this kind of magic. Normally analogue switches are subject to the same limitations as laid out above and the logic switching voltage must be between Vss and Vdd. I referred to the Modern CMOS Circuits Manual book which mentions that some devices - the 4051 and 4053 - have a logic level converter. In effect a 0-Vdd input logic level can be translated into a Vss-Vdd level internally. Those devices are multiplexers though and take a binary 3-line logic input to decode which of the 8 switches to enable. This is no good for this design as we have a line per switch and moreover need to be able to switch all the keys on or off independently.

In summary neither analogue switches or simple transistor circuitry can be used to switch a negative current. I'm glad I checked though as it would have bothered me. I actually spoke with a few colleagues who are full-time electronic engineers and they all initially thought it must be possible, only to conclude that it wouldn't be. It's such an unusual situation that it's easy to get caught out.

Reed relays?

Metal Vs Silicon

 So, opto-couplers it is! Or maybe not. One suggestion a  colleague gave me was reed relays. The main advantage of a reed relay would be that in electrical terms the mechanical switch contact in the keyboard would be replaced by another metal contact switch and not silicon. Introducing silicon might affect the circuit in some way. Perhaps. Or perhaps not much, but the simplicity of this solution is attractive and it might remove some possible risks.

Slim Jims

 One other nice thing about relays is that some come in narrow, SIP (single, in-line pin) packages. So you can see that they could be lined up neatly and compactly. This Coto part http://www.cotorelay.com/datasheets/Coto%20Technology%209007%20Spartan%20SIP%20Reed%20Relay.pdf is 5mm wide*.With a maximum of 13 switches per line (from the four K' boards) and assuming that I would stack the boards vertically, that would be a minimum* of 6.5cm per board, which is around the length I would want it to be.

* Actually they are 5.08mm wide which is 2 x 2.54mm, the standard pitch for through-hole PCB components and boards. At a minimum you could sit them side-by-side, on adjacent lines on a strip-board with no gaps.

Tracking out

 The only down-side of this package is that that the coil pins are on the inside (pins 2 and 3) so you can't as easily track to the outside edge of the board.

To be clear, I'm working on the assumption that the board will have wires from the MIDI interface going in one side and wires to the K boards on the other. Because both of the coil pins are on the inside of the device if you line then all side-by-side there is no easy way to get one of those pins out to the edge.

It would have been great to just use veroboard for this and avoided any kind of tracking out. It's frustrating but they all seem to be designed like this so it looks like I will still need a custom PCB.

Quick enough

 There is one potential downside - timing. This Hamlin part http://www.hamlin.com/specsheets/he3600%20revised.pdf , which is currently the cheapest at Farnell, has a maximum turn on of 1ms. The next is half that at 0.5ms. To be frank I don't think the SS30-M is going to be played at high tempos and the in-built attack and release are already quite slow. A millisecond is not going to be noticeable.

Decision?

So, reed-relays it is.Is it? Am I decided?
I think so but I need to work out the PCB and think about the options a bit more before deciding once and for all.