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So the footswitch and the relay seem to be working. The only thing that seems to not be working is the function of the red LED. Why don’t you go ahead and finish calibrating the pedal and soldering the jumpers…see if everything works except for the LED.
Since you know the actual LED is working (from when your multimeter powered it on during the diode test) and properly orientated, the problem is probably with a solder joint either on the LED itself, R11, or on the microcontroller…check pin 6. Make sure R11 is the correct value and there is continuity from one pin of R11 to pin 6 of the microcontroller. Test to see that pin 6 is going high (to 5 volts) when the LED should be on…measure this on the pin of the microcontroller itself, not at the socket’s solder joint. Make sure the microcontroller is seated properly in it’s socket.
It’s got to be something simple like this. The microcontroller is almost certainly working properly.
Good luck.
-BrachI understand. That is very frustrating.
I was assuming since I didn’t hear from you for a while that re-flowing the solder joints worked…at least until now. Is that correct?
I know you’ve been putting pedals together for many years now, so I’m sure you know that these types of intermittent issues are always related to bad connections somewhere…that’s pretty much the only thing that can cause them. If you’ve already re-flowed all the solder joints and re-seat the microcontroller, the only thing I think that I could do is to look at your board…there may be something that I happen to notice. If you want me to do that, you can send me some detailed, in focus photos of both sides of your circuit board to info “at” zeppelindesignlabs “dot” com. I want to look at the solder joints, so try to focus on those. You should bend up the pots as much as possible so I can see under them. Hopefully, I can see something in the details of the photos that was easy to miss in real-life.
Once again, I’m really sorry for this annoyance. I know it is frustrating.
-BrachThat sounds fun! I’m glad to hear you are liking it so much.
…but check the Altura page again. I updated it today so you may need to refresh your cache. It should have a link to our GitHub page with the source code.
-BrachLike I said, anything is possible if you want to devote enough resources to it.
Check out the software section under the documentation tab on the Altura page.
Good luck!
-BrachYou certainly are enthusiastic!
Each pot has 3 pins: ground on one side, +5V on the other, and the wiper (center) which gives out a voltage between 5V and ground depending on how far it’s turned. So if you want to put all the pots in one box, you’d just need one wire for each pot’s wiper plus a 5V wire and ground wire (which can be run in series to all the pots)…that’s 9 wires in total. So a something like a VGA cable could work, if you want to use D-sub connectors.
Look at the schematic in the back of the assembly manual to see how the pots are wired.
-BrachUnfortunately, your friend is wrong about it being a drop in replacement. The hardware is rather different (once again ultrasonic vs. optical), which means that the sensor uses different types of pins with completely different data coming from them. Of course anything is possible if you want to put enough resources into it, so you could re-write the software to make it work. But the VL53L0X isn’t really an upgrade to the SR04. When I was designing the Altura I specifically used the ultrasonic sensor because it worked much better in this application. Here’s a video pointing out what I discovered…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGtD93wb7xI
The thing the optical sensor is much better at is detecting distance of angled objects, which isn’t necessary in the Altura’s application. What I wanted was accuracy, which the SR04 is much better at. Another factor is stability; and if anyone is trying to use an optical sensor on a stage with unpredictable stage lights, that could be a problem. There is a lot of light pollution in the IR range in those types of environments.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts.
-BrachI suppose your talking about making the sensors pickup in some sort of Cartesian coordinate pickup pattern…like the Kaoss pad uses the X-Y planes. Unfortunately, in the Altura’s case you can’t really cross the sensors because they will interact with each other, based on what i was saying earlier about the sensors being ultrasonic technology rather than optical.
Historically, 2 hands were used with Theremins because controlling pitch and volume need to be independent of each other. I don’t think it would be too easy to try it with one hand. Besides the circuitry would have been very difficult to design with the analog components they had 90 years ago when the Theremin was invented.
-BrachCoffeepal,
I’m glad you are enjoying your Altura.
Not that it probably matters, but the sensors aren’t actually optical, they are ultrasonic…which is a much different technology and may be a factor in how you end up using the Altura.
But to answer your question, there is nothing special about the ribbon cable that connects the sensors. You could use cat 5. Whatever you use, my suggestion is to not solder directly to the headers of the sensors. Instead, cut one of the ribbon cables in two and strip the 4 wires and solder the cat 5 wires to those. That way you have a female header that you plug directly onto the sensor male header. It keeps things more modular that way and easier to troubleshoot or replace things.
One factor you need to be aware of is that the Altura has no driver for the sensor signals, so there is a finite limit of how long the cables can be. The distance depends on the capacitance and resistance of the type of cable you are using and the drive capability of the microcontroller and sensor hardware. If you want to make it much longer than what it currently is, you’ll just need to experiment with what works for you. I imagine that a couple of feet of cat 5 will probably be fine, and cat 6 would even be better.
Good luck.
-BrachThanks for the photos. It looks like a lot of your solder joints should be reflowed. I would reflow all of them for good measure. Use a bit more heat (leave the iron on the joint a bit longer) and less solder this time.
Your power amp chip is working because you get a buzz on the speaker when you touch the pins of the amp chip. The problem is on the digital sides somewhere. How is the 5V power rail?
-BrachWell that’s good news! There was a small chance of something like that happening, so good job finding it. I’m glad I was able to help you. It’s fun to practice my troubleshooting skills. And troubleshooting remotely helps keep my skills sharp!
Anyway, enjoy your Quaverato!
-BrachSterlingLl,
Thank you for letting us know about this, and i’m sorry for any anxiety this has given you. To answer your question, no, this is not a big deal and you don’t need to order new resistors. The fact is, this could simply be an issue with your meter or probes (i’m not saying your meter isn’t good), or even more likely, the how the measurement was done. If the solder joint has flux on the surface of it, most of the time the resistance readings will be high. The sharp point on the probe is good for digging into the solder a bit to get past the flux layer. But it is just as likely that the resistors are, in fact, out of spec…especially if all the other resistors measured good. We get them from a large supplier overseas, so it is very possible they sent us some resistors that was pushed through the QC process. Fortunately, in this case it’s exact tolerance isn’t important. In the manual, I said that to make sure all the resistors were in the correct range….i should have probably worded it differently. Sorry for the confusion and needless worry.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up about this.
Enjoy your Quaverato!
Take care.
-BrachGood job! Now we can be (mostly) sure that your pot is not working correctly. Once you remove it, just double check the resistance (from the center lug to one of the side lugs) as you turn it. Technically, there still is a very small possibility that there is a short on the center lug from some other 5 volt point, but practically we have enough information to warrant you removing the pot from the board. Once you do this final test on the removed pot and find out that it’s bad, email us at info “at” zeppelindesignlabs “dot” com and give us your address and serial number so we can send you a new part.
-BrachThank you for making that check. You may very well be right about the pot…But i do think you need to take the microcontroller out and test it again without it in the circuit. What if the microcontroller has an internal short or partial short to ground?…you could get the same test result. Testing components in a circuit can be kind of tricky because you have to consider everything else that is attached to that circuit node. The microcontroller pins are supposed to be high impedance (over 1M) but it is possible for each pin’s internal resistor to become damaged. I’m sorry I mislead you in my previous directions, I forgot about this contingency. And sorry to have you keep working on this, but it’s important to get an accurate diagnosis.
Let me know what you find.
-BrachPoorness,
Good troubleshooting!
You possibly have a bad pot, but there’s also a good chance that the problem is something else, like the microcontroller is injecting 5V on the pot…you just don’t notice it until there is enough resistance on the pot to hold it above ground level.
Test the pot by measuring the resistance of the microcontroller’s pin 24 to ground, when the pedal power is off. It should scale from around 0 ohms to around 100k ohms as you turn it. If it’s is stuck at some high value for most of the rotation then the pot’s bad.
If the pot’s good then remove the microcontroller from it’s socket (very carefully, without bending it’s pins) and power up the pedal…then measure the voltage on pin 24 again as you rotate the rate pot. Test to see if the voltage is scaling as you rotate it. If this works, then the problem is with the microcontroller…or there’s somehow a short between pin 24 and 5V.
Let me know what you find.
-Brach
