News

Updates on project progress, and any other developments.

3 June 2026

All coils are now wound! 

This job was always going to be a bit fiddly, and tolerances on the 3D printed parts made it more so than expected.
Assembling ten units is a good test of the design, a few adjustments will be needed before making more of these.

18 May 2026

The build continues... last week was spent wiring up and shielding the interlock relays - now ready to be installed - and adjusting trimpoints on the pcbs, to get the tone signal clipping consistent.

10 May 2026 - build update

After a busy week, the mains and valve heater circuits are installed:

The heater wiring has to be dressed carefully to avoid AC hum:

5 May 2026 - build update

Most of the circuits on the boards have now been tested, it took a while to track down a few errors and get those fixed.
Now on to making up leads for the power inlet/switch, and dressing the transformer wiring.

Valve bases have also been mounted onto the first 5 cases.
Next job is to wire in the heater circuits.

25 April 2026 - build update

Circuit boards for the first batch of instruments are now complete and being tested.

It has taken forever to get these done - the first design was an improvement on the original rats' nest, but extensive changes were needed.
Low prototyping funds meant we had to go with a second version, and this one still required a fair bit of rework - a few op-amps had to be reconfigured, like this:

and a couple of VCAs added, replacing noisy optoisolators:

Safe to say, it was a happy event getting that job done!

So it's finally time to build up these synths. Watch this space for updates, things should move faster now.