Thanks Christian. Any idea what voltage the red LED’s use? An interesting upgrade might be to use tri-colour LED’s (each colour has it’s own voltage range) and use a microcontroller to switch voltages for different firmware functions — eg… give pitch functions all one colour.

Before I forget…

A word of warning to anyone attempting to repair or replace the LED’s in the encoder rings, it’s not as easy as a regular desoldering job. Each of the LED leads passes through a plastic piece that acts as baffles between each LED. You can desolder one LED but you will have to feed the leads for the replacement through the baffle and then through the holes in the board — and it’s almost impossible to do. You will either have to desolder every LED around the encoder so you can feed each leads through the baffle (bleh) or get lucky threading the leads through the baffle and the board.

What I ended up doing was using a Hakko desoldering gun to completely clear the holes of solder and fed the leads of a cheap capacitor through the board holes in reverse (the leads stick up through the baffle). I then clipped the leads on the LED very short and soldered them to the capacitor leads. Last step was to pull the capacitor away from the board, which pulls the led into it’s place in the baffle — you then clip the capacitor off and carefully solder the leads to the board. Be careful with the heat as you’ll melt the solder that keeps the LED connected to the leads.