Well this happened quite by chance, Bob over at Tauntek designed a simple processor replacement board for the Poly 61 which suffers from major battery leak issues over the 30+ years of its life. Most people repair the board and some replace it with a Syntronics clone board, well now you can DIY with the Tauntek board and it adds MIDI and more features and higher resolution for some of the controls, plus no battery at all. I got some boards made and built my first one for my Poly 61 and the I thought, if I get some boards for a 61 then surely I can use this cheap DIY board as the main controller. I found the boards I wanted on eBay and a few weeks later I started building a rack version.
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Well I powered it up today, a stupid mistake between +5 and +15 on one board meant I fried 3 envelope generators, also voice 1 sounds strange, also I forgot to solder all the pins for a connector and that had intermittent faults until I found it, but other than that it’s working fine.
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Here’s the current progress.
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Pretty much the finished Poly 61-RM, I have been testing the functions and found a few bugs, Bob was able to fix these issues including adding the ARP over MIDI which wasn’t in his original code. I connected this rack over MIDI with my existing Poly 61 for 12 voices in stereo, so it can act as an expander when the main Poly 61 is set to external mode. I have had to program the PIC chip about 6 times and to get to it meant removing the top board, but I just cut an acces hole wide enough to get to the PIC easily and remove it for programming, not great, but it helps
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