Behringer FCB1010: FCBInfinity finally doing what was intended!

… it’s working! Haha, it’s 1:30 am here, and tomorrow I will probably read this post and see many typos but nonetheless I wanted to share the following with you:

Nais! We’ve got patch names and tuner on the display over midi!

Really awesome! I also found out that the AxeFx (at least the AxeFx-II) sends a midi message when you change presets manually on the AxeFx, this means I can keep the FCBInfinity totally in sync. So far I can request the AxeFx to send the patch name and display the response on-screen and also display the Tuner messages. Unfortunately the AxeFx doesn’t send tuner messages all the time and you really need to enable the tuner (by Midi) on the AxeFx to receive the tuner data. That means I do need to add a dedicated button to toggle the tuner.

The 1 to 10 buttons on the FCB are programmed to change between patches 1 – 10 on the Axe at the moment. I only have one strange thing when sending the ProgramChange messages to the AxeFx. Changing presets from 1 – 10 work fine, except when I change to preset #2, then the Axe suddenly jumps to 384 (Bypass). Changing to patch #1 and #3 work fine… Mind boggling, someone got a clue?

Anyways, now I have most of the components I need to make this into a kick ass controller, I only have  to write the code to get the parameters for global effect blocks, so I can detect what effects are enabled/disabled on a preset change event. Exciting times!

 

This is what it looks like so far

A greeting to my friends at the Fractal Audio Forums

 

Behringer FCB1010: FCBInfinity picking up speed

Finally starting to make some big steps. I have everything soldered onto the new PCB and instead of soldering wires directly to the board it now has nice connectors, so I can connect stuff step by step. That allowed me to start putting the unit back together, so yesterday evening I had the new PCB in it’s final location and some of the optics hooked up. Unfortunately I had to order a new LCD, because a couple soldering pads got destroyed while trying to desolder the old (buggy) connector I had placed on it. It will probably arrive on monday. Fortunately I can continue development by implementing the basic MIDI stuff, I dont need the LCD for that (yet).

Everything soldered onto the new PCB

The bottom side of the new PCB

The location of the new PCB in the unit. This clearly shows why you need to remove the power supply and use a phantom power mod.

 

Below you can see the LED digits are working. The Green and Blue channel of the RGB-led on the left (the stompbox bank indicator) are now controlled by the expression pedals for testing purposes.

FCBInfinity, hello world!

 

Behringer FCB1010: PCB Bliss

Sorry for not updating a while, but here’s what happened in the meanwhile:

The DIY printed circuit board I created myself had some errors that I tried to fix by cutting some traces on the board and soldering new wires to replace the traces, while this worked it didn’t really feel dependable anymore. As I promised myself before, this thing should be tough and dependable. Though for testing I figured it should suffice and I could just order some nice manufactured PCBs in the meanwhile. Then I discovered another mistake in the design, as shown in the picture below I wired the connector for the upper button/led panel wrong. Led1, Led2, Led3, lbtn4, Led5, is not how the connector is wired 😛 Analysing the impact of this error led me to discarding my DIY-board alltogether, since it required me to reroute too many traces.

The reason I’m posting now is that the manufactured boards have finally arrived. Well, “finally”, because 1 week is blazingly fast in my honest opinion (props to www.eurocircuits.com). Yesterday I prepared a little bit by desoldering all the components from the old board, so tonight I can spend by soldering everything onto the new board. As you can see I ordered some extra boards, so once I’m done programming everything I will make those available to anyone interested (price yet to be decided). I’ve already updated everything on my FCBInfinity GitHub repository so you can make a PCB yourself or have one made for you by a PCB service. Everything will be open source, the source code as well, so you too can do anything you want with this device.

The shiny new PCBs manufactured by http://www.eurocircuits.com

Behringer FCB1010: Custom PCB update

Well, it shows this is the first time I do a project like this; things don’t go as fast as I want them to. While the board turned out fine for most parts, it seems I have made two errors in the design. The first is that the power regulator is backwards. The side that needs cooling and is bolted to the exterior of the FCB1010 is now faced inward (oops). The second error is that the expression pedals require an analog pin on the Teensy, due to a last-minute change in the design it seems they are hooked to a standard digital port at the moment. To remedy these two errors I unfortunately had to cut some traces on the board and relay the traces using some wires. Not really the way I wanted the board to end up, but I guess I will just finish it all up as-is. Of course I will fix the design and I’ll just have someone develop the new board for me (or more if you’re interested in a PCB of your own). Once I receive that board I will desolder everything and move it into the corrected PCB.

Howeverrrrr… most things work great now! The LCD, the RGB-led stompbox bank indicator, the Expression pedal circuitry, the LED digits, etc, etc, they all work! Now I just have to hook the two original button PCBs up to my board and start placing everything back in the FCB1010’s housing. Then I finally can start working on programming everything the way I want them to work. Soon, soon! 😛

Top side of the PCB, looking good

Bottom side, clearly shows the wires I had to use to fix my errors in the design

Behringer FCB1010: A fresh PCB!

Yesterday evening I finally got around to make a PCB. After making a testing etch I have found what would be the best method for me to approach this.

Tada! A freshly etched and drilled board, with the main components plugged in.

Toner Transfer

One of the toughest things was to find some proper way to protect the copper on the board from the etching material. I tried printing the design on some glossy photo paper, but while trying to perform the transfer using an iron I found out the hard way that the paper contained a lot of plastics, thus ending up with a piece of paper glued to my iron. 😛 Then I found an ingenious bloke on the Internet that used cheap advertising folders and papers to do the transfer. This paper is awesome because you can get it for free and people even bring it to you for free! 😛 Also it is very thin and easy to feel off with the help of a little warm water. Only printing on the paper was a little harder, the paper is so thin that my laser printer couldn’t really get a grip and started munching the paper. After some tries I just taped the cheap paper to a piece of normal printing paper and everything came out clean.

The idea with PCB design toner transfer is that the laser printer toner is based on a kind of plastic that melts at higher temperatures. Thus printing it on a paper and then ironing it to a copper board will transfer the plastic toner to the copper board, hence the name “Toner Transfer”. Awesome! … so, now what?

The design on the cheap paper

Ironing the paper to perform the toner transfer

Etching

After having the design ironed on the board, getting the copper etched off is fairly simple. I just used a commonly used Ferricchloride solution and bathed the copper board in there for about 10 minutes. After that time I ended up with a nice little board, but with the printer toner still on. Nothing that a little thinner can’t handle 😉

The board in the etching solution

The freshly etched board

After a little thinner the copper traces are clearly visible

Drilling

Aargh, etching the board was the fun part! Having to drill the 226 holes for the components and vias (a pathway from the top of the board to the bottom of the board) was a pain. Also while drilling I discovered that the top and bottom traces were slightly misaligned. So here and there I might run into some problems while soldering, but we’ll deal with that later. If it’s really a problem I might just have some company develop the board for me, because drilling was quite a lengthy job and simply a bore. Plus if you let someone else develop your board you only have to worry about soldering on your components, now I have to solder all the vias myself and I don’t have the nice green solder-stop protective coating. However, below is the etched board with some of the main components already in place. Tonight I will start on soldering all the components and quite possibly also be able to test the buttons and leds.

Drilling the 226 holes. Fun…

Bottom layer with the led digits and the max7219 chip to control the leds and digits

The top-side with the teensy, the connectors and the power regulator

Schematic v2

As promised I just redid the schematic for easier readability. I have also redesigned the PCB and added all the pins for the leds, buttons and other IO that isn’t mounted directly on the PCB. A new 3D shot of the PCB below. The new schematic can be viewed below, i’ve also added the PCB toner transfer for those who want to recreate this.

Tomorrow I’ll try to do the toner transfer to a copper board, IF I find some usable laser printer photo paper. I really want to finish up asap, because my AxeFx will arrive coming week (happy, happy!) 😛

 

EDIT: In the meantime this design has become obsolete. You can find all the recent schematics and renderings on GitHub/FCBInfinity.

FCBInfinity v2.0 Schematic

FCBInfinity v2.0 PCB Toner Transfer

Behringer FCB1010: schematics, making a mess

Well…

There’s always a first time for everything. This is the first time I’m working with PCB designing software. So far I have copied everything on my breadboard to a schematic and had the program figure out a PCB for me. I’ll probably have to redo the entire schematic from scratch because as you can see; it’s a mess, HAHA! But I have now learned how to use the program properly so the next design will be much cleaner, I promise 😛 After I get back in 2 weeks I’ll quickly redo the design and etch the copper PCB. Hopefully things will pick up speed then.

EDIT: In the meantime this design has become obsolete. You can find all the recent schematics and renderings on GitHub/FCBInfinity.

At first glance, a nice little PCB

Which came from this messy schematic, haha

Behringer FCB1010 Power and Midi IN/OUT over single UTP / RJ45 Cable Modification

After seeing many nice modifications for the popular Behringer FCB1010 MIDI pedal board I have decided to create one of my own. Unable to find information for a mod with similar cabling i decided to post my findings here. Just to inspire others to create even better mods for this awesome pedal board.

The main purpose of this mod is to provide the FCB with a single cable for two-way Midi and power. I don’t want a million cables on the floor and I was looking for a cable setup that was cheap and the cable should be easily replaceable. I need 4 conductors for Midi and 2 for power, therefore I decided to go for a simple computer UTP cable which has 8 conductors. These cables are cheap and easy to obtain and they come prefab in many different lengths and colors.

There are quite a few phantom power mods out there which require one to use either switches or diode-rectifiers to switch between phantom- or self-powered operation of the FCB. I decided I would never want to have the FCB self-powered and I would just take the power converter from the board. This would make the setup much simpler.

Materials for this project:

(all bought from conrad.nl for those in Europe)

1x Euro-casing black 150x50x80mm (part# 520616)	€ 2,85
2x Neutrik RJ45 chassis bus NE 8 FDV (part# 746738)	€ 12,54
1x CAT 5E cable F/UTP 5m (part# 990581)	€ 13,99
1x 3m 5pin midi cable I had laying around	€ 6,79
Tapered drill
Some shrink tubing
Soldering supplies and tools
Total	€ 36,17

(€ 36,17 is roughly 45 USD)

Ripping out the power converter

As mentioned earlier I decided to use the FCB1010’s own power converter and relocate it into to an external casing for phantom power. So first step was to clip the wires on the power converter and take it out of the FCB. Make sure to clip the yellow wires, leading to the circuit board, halfway so you can have enough room to solder the clipped ends to the RJ45 connectors later on. Removing the power converter looks easier said than done. In the end I had to push out the main power switch and temporarily remove a glued led before I was able to do so.

Be safe and properly seal the wires from the old main power connector, so you don’t get electrocuted when someone accidentally hooks up a power cable to the old connector.

Relocating the power converter to its new home

The power converter in my unit has three input wires and two output wires (as seen below). But like the original setup I only used the red and black input wires. Since this casing would be permanently installed in my flight case I opted to just make direct cables for the connections that would stay connected permanently: Power to my power conditioner and Midi to my AxeFX. Therefore I just soldered a power cable directly to the two input wires of the power converter.

The two yellow output wires from the power converter are also alternating current (AC). Since the current alternates we don’t have to worry about positive and negative and we can just solder the two wires to two of the pins on the RJ45 chassis bus. I used shrink tubing to tidy everything up.

Midi in the external case

After I made two holes for the midi cables I cut the 3 meter midi cable in pieces so that I ended up with two midi connectors and a piece of wire of the length I desired. After stripping the wires I soldered the 4 and 5 pin wires to 4 pins on the RJ45 chassis bus. Notice how I made a knot in the power and midi cables, preventing tension on the soldering if one would pull on those cables.

A few tips on soldering: 1/ If you want to use shrink tubing, put over the wire before soldering 😉
2/ Pre solder some tin on the wire and pins before making the actual solder, this gives you a free hand to hold the wires in place.

Drilling the FCB1010

As seen in the photo below I located the RJ45 bus next to the external switch jacks. This location gives you a lot of room to solder your wires and still be close to the midi connectors on the FCB. Disconnect the plug for the external switch 1&2 from the FCB circuit board to give yourself a little more room to operate.

Drilling the hole for the bus proved to be the hardest part of the project. After destroying a few of my Dremel bits I decided to get a tapered drill to finish the job. That was really the easiest way to get the hole to the size I wanted.

A tapered drill

Soldering the FCB RJ45

Remember we cut the yellow power wires in half at the start of the project when we took out the power converter? Now we should have more than enough wire to reach the RJ45 bus. Find the pins you used for the power and solder the yellow wires to them. Again, it’s alternating current, so order doesn’t matter. Don’t forget your shrink tubing.

Next up is the soldering of the Midi wires. We’re just going to solder the wires from the RJ45 bus to the original midi input and outputs of the FCB. At this moment it doesn’t really matter what pair we solder to which midi port, just as long as you solder the pairs to the 4 and 5 pins. On the connectors it’s the pin 2 and 4 counted from left to right, or another way to describe: don’t solder on the middle and outer pins. 😉 Keep in mind that unlike the power cables, the Midi is directed so polarity does matter. In my case I had to de-solder the wires from the original midi connectors and swap them, because the FCB wouldn’t work.

Don’t forget to reconnect your external switch 1&2 connector if you want to use them.

The end (result)

The end result is that I have a tidy little box that I can just leave permanently connected in my flight case and when I want to hook up my FCB I just have a single cable to plug in.

I think my next project is to add a LCD and a couple of extra switches to the FCB using a Teensy development board and have the Teensy board also communicate over Midi. This would allow me to show the AxeFX tuner and patch names on the FCB. I might go crazy and completely gut the FCB and have the Teensy handle all the buttons. End result: (midi) world domination, but then this would no longer be a FCB1010, but FCB-Infinity or whatever. I’ll make sure to split up those projects in two steps, so I can show you how to have the FCB communicate with AxeFX with minimal changes to the FCB.

I hope you enjoyed!