Casiotone CT-701

[Fnord]

Hello all,

I just rescued a Casiotone CT-701 from a church's junk room.  It's in near mint condition, needing only some cleaning and the tightening of a few screws.  The keyboard action is good, the sound is clear (without distorts, dropouts or spikes), and all but one of the switches seem to work.

Unfortunately, I have only the user's manual.  I need the service manual, with schematics, so I can start bending and modding the instrument.  I have checked the Casio website (of course), and performed extensive Google searches without success.  Can anyone help a bloke out?

I am an electronics engineer, so making my own schematic is not impossible, just tedious.

Cheers!

-Fnord-

[Gordonjcp]

Have you tried just phoning Casio up?  Quite often you end up getting to the guy in the workshop that remembers these old bangers when they came out...

[Fnord]

Tried that.  Nobody there seems to know much.  I may have to try again after year's end.  Emailing upper management has brought no response yet, either.

I'm working out the parameters of the light pen attachment.  It's listed in the book as an "MS-1 Barcode Reader".  It also seems to have been used on other Casio models.  A schematic of just that device would go a long way.

Cheers!

-Fnord-

[Fnord]

I found a schematic for the light pen attachment!  It seems straightforward.  Now I get to build one from scratch.

I wonder if I could use the light pen port to load data directly from a PC ...

Cheers!

-Fnord-

[Gordonjcp]

You could, in theory.  You'd need to a) work out the format of the barcodes the pen reads, and b) write a program to toggle a pin maybe on the parallel port to send the data to the keyboard.  Figuring out the barcode format is likely to be the tricky bit.

[Fnord]

BCR Barcode (a.k.a.: "Casio MS Memory") Format:

BCR discriminates 2.0mm black code bars as logic '1', and 0.8mm code bars as logic '0'.

Coding is binary (hexadecimal translation provided), and is presented in four-bit 'Nybbles'.

Front dummy code: '0000' (&h0)
Start code: '0010' (&h2)
Line number: '0000' through '1111' (&h0 through &hF)
Header (Exists only in the first lines of Pitch, Length, and Chord):
- Pitch: '0001' (&h1)
- Length: '0010' (&h2)
- Chord: '0100' (&h4)
Data (8-bit byte per data segment): See Below*
Line end mark: '1111' (&hF)
Check nybble: (May be CRC or Parity ... still investigating - Fnord)
Rear dummy code: '0000' (&h0)

*Each pitch is represented by two hexadecimal digits. The first digit is the note number in the octave.  The second digit associated with each pitch tells the computer the octave number of the note.

NOTE CODES 
0 - Rest
1 - C natural
2 - C sharp
3 - D natural
4 - D sharp
5 - E natural
6 - F natural
7 - F sharp
8 - G natural
9 - G sharp
A - A natural
B - A sharp
C - B natural
D - Rhythm on
E - Unknown
F - End of bar

Still digging ... more to come ...