If you’ve the card master you’re heading the right way. (And making me jealous. The “was he slow?” Jam from Baby Driver -wow!)
However the card reader in the Yamaha is not recording audio like the card master but pulses like the strip on an older bank/store card. For these you only need a mag stripe encoder to write your own (card and plastic stock with a fresh mag stripe is still widely available as are paper train tickets, boarding passes and some produce lables). A new encoder today is pricey but older models appear on eBay regularly for under £20. A reader (read only) mechanism is really cheap and as they were used in retail, the older models are still robust, filthy, but robust. So you could swipe a random card as the seed for a fractal sequencer or simply ‘if this card play that song’. (Which is the gist of the PC100 setup)
I plan to make a few additions to my PC100 including additional Hall sensors, an RFID reader and a Card Master style card stock transport mechanism and looper. If I can get my head around the circuit I’ll add a midi clock in.
A facelift to annoy the retro-purists and because it’s proper 80’s fugly. I have a wonderful Johnston Tartan cloth I’ll epoxy over the charming plastic case so you can carry it into any building without feeling like you’re on one of the Gruber brother’s earlier, ‘budget’ heists.
Some of the most fun I’ve had with synths is hooking up piezo mics on taped to a drum kit to trigger signals, this looks like it would be great for something like that, either piezo or with digi/audio signals.
It is still available. It is a K100. I allready went back there two times and made physical contact. To see it waiting there facing the elements is painfull for me…
Seriously! I realy like it but i’d get into big trouble with my wife if i pick it up…
It is a Hammond, probably my only chsnce of ever owning one. BUT…!
It would definitely survive life on a pallet outdoors if you cover it well when not being the life and soul of every garden party.
Run your “outdoor” modular into the Hammond’s amp, some lights, lasers, I digress; go! Get it! Yours! You saw it. JFDI.
Whatever strife you imagine is nothing to the joy of Hammond ownership (too much). Restored they make good rental money.
Again picked up on a flea market. There is something small floating around inside the case but it is fully working. With two additional song ROMs. 20 credits (euro). Perfectly fits into my collection of … stuff
Maybe i get rom emulation with arduino running
Back, as I promised, with a picture of the top panel of the mystery delay. After a little search “Steven” appears to be a copy of an identical-looking Phonic device, which, after some further search appears to be nearly identical to the 1984 JHS Digitec Delay, as reviewed back in the day in Home & Studio Recording and One Two Testing. The functional diagram on the top looks the same as the 1984 device, and the only difference in the functions is that the Phonic/Steven replaced the tone switch in the JHS Digitec with a potentiometer. Incidentally, JHS Digitec has no relationship with the guitar pedal companies JHS and Digitech. It is a much older brand (associated with a music store in England I think, much like Thomann has their own brands these days).
I expected a BBD delay but I see that it is built around a bunch of TTL and CMOS NAND gates, 1980s RAM ICs, and a bunch of unidentified ICs labelled with stickers on them, along with 11 germanium diodes (perhaps for some sort of limiter circuit?). There are also several JRC4558 dual op amps (that could be found all over Japanese consumer HiFi in the 1980s), along with an LM324, a compander, and a few CD4015 shift registers.
Here’s another find. A Realistic (RadioShack brand) Micro-10 micro cassette recorder. It is missing its back cover, battery compartment, and three screws that connect the main PCB to the transport mechanism.
It looks like someone tried to repair it, but it powers on, the capstan spins, and it seems fine for… the usual purposes. I don’t have a micro cassette to test it, but the only fault I can see is that it’s impossible to open the cassette door and that the door mechanism that allows the record button to be pushed works only when the door is open. Obviously, not an issue when the whole thing is taken apart.
Now I see a dedicated motor speed control PCB and a play/rec switch that is actuated by the record button. Mic in and phones out switching jacks that disable the onboard mic and speaker respectively…
I will try to test it with some regular tape to see if it records and plays back sound to begin with, but any advice and ideas on what to do are welcome.
I’d be happy if it works well enough to hack it into recording and playing loops outside the (micro) cassette format.
