Akai U40 bends

[davethedoobie]

Hi Everyone,

been messing around with the insides of an Akai U40 riff-o-matic.  It is a one phrase sampler I was actually using it to record bends for a project I was working on.

Anyway, on opening it up inside and after several hours of fiddling I have found some nice bends based around a series of chips at the bottom of the board Gordon will probably know exactly how these work, What I have discovered is that you get different bends depending on whether you are monitoring the signal or altering the sample.

The conundrum I have at the momemt is finding a strong but small wire that will attach to the tiny pins on the board.

I was quite surprised at how many bends their are on this and wondered if other cheap samplers may have the same potential.

Ant thoughts?

[Circuitbenders]

Its great fun soldering to those surface mount chips isn't it? What i usually do is get the smallest iron tip i have and flow a tiny amount of solder onto the pin, then tin a thin bit of wire and apply one to the other with the soldering iron. You have to be quick though. If it doesn't work first time just take it off and try again in a few seconds rather than risking overheating the chip.

I think the U40 has the same RAM chips as the S20. Try googling the chip to find the datasheet, you can usually get good effects by shorting the I/O pins together. On problem i can up against was that you can't run very long wires from the RAM chip before weird things start happening. Check out the S20 thread for more details:

http://www.circuitbenders.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,1518.0.html

[davethedoobie]

Thanks Paul

got some data cable which is minute.  I have managed to get a few bends to stick to the pins but as you say the iron can only stay on for a fraction of a second, testing different types of solder that I have acquired.

I will post some pictures of the board etc when I am complete.

[Circuitbenders]

Don't use lead free solder, it has a much higher melting point and its just crap in general.

I've had some luck with using multicore parallel cables for this kind of thing as you get 25 cores and the wires are very thin. The only trouble being the issues that seem to plague this kind of thing with closely packed cabling over a certain length.