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Took about 2.5 hours to assemble and solder up. The capacitive touch keyboard is very unreliable on 9V battery power, but plugged into a wall wart everything works ok good. I’d love STL files for a 3D printed case instead of the cardboard one shipped with the kit. Maybe I’ll whip one up in the next few weeks.
What you describe is a known issue. The keyboard will become increasingly unstable as the voltage from the battery drops. Try a brand-new name brand alkaline battery. Further, the keyboard is sensitive to grounding. It generally works better the more stuff you plug into it — headphones, line-out, power supply. You will notice that the keyboard behaves better when you have a finger touching the far left or right edge. It will work better when your hands are sweaty, or if you lick your fingers.
Another user recently experimented with adding a ground plane by placing a piece of aluminum foil on the inside bottom of his Macchiato cabinet, and connecting it with a bit of wire to the PCB. Some time soon I intend to post his procedure to this forum.
That cabinet model to which you refer, if memory serves, leaves room for improvement. We do still hope to publish some models one of these days.Nice! Yeh, I read the “Macchiato Quick Start Guide and Reference Manual”, so I went out and got a 9V center-neg wall wart. I was pleasantly surprised when that fixed the issue. I have a garbage battery in there now — good to know that a better one might help. The ground plane thing sounds pretty cool.
I s’pose I could try to whip up a case if pressed — I have some OpenSCAD experience. I hope one of these days comes soon though. Remembering which of that row of 9 potentiometers does what is pretty daunting. A laser-cut case might be interesting too.
The Cornfield Electronics “ArduTouch” kit ( https://cornfieldelectronics.com/cfe/products/buy.php?productId=synth&PHPSESSID=s08pbf05g55vqgt0gl7calt822 ) suffers from the same keyboard troubles. Conductive pads and an alligator clip works well on the Nebulophone, but on your machine it would make the cool polyphony feature difficult. There ain’t no Straight Lines in the world.
