Dave and I have been working on a xoxbox clone, which itself is a clone of a Roland TB-303.  I thought this would be a cool project to try to implement using surface mount as much as we could.  We are in the middle of board bring up right now. I’ll update this post as we progress. So far we must be about two months into this project, Dave has been very ambitious doing all of the schematic capture, an damn near all of the layout. I brought him the Scottish energy drinks he needed to finish the work.

The boards were ordered from dirtypcb, and cost about $200CDN total for 20 boards (10 each) of the boards below, including solder stencils and rush shipping and processing. we got he boards in 1 week. I am reasonably impressed.

So far we have the following working:

• PSU
• headphone amp
• digital section – FTDI, some buttons, the tempo encoder (works but is backwards), and so does the mode select switch
• DAC – we are measuring random voltages out of the resistor ladder.

Next we will go through the rest of the bring up: VCO, envelope generator, VCF, BA662 emulation etc.

I’ve run some versions of the c0ntr0l software, they connect to the x0x, over the FTDI. Here is a photo of the business side of the board during population:

Update, VCO now works: yay!

Here is the sawtooth wave, and the sound file that goes with it (both sawtooth and square wave).  Not too interesting yet:

 Test