[EgorParticipant]

Picture won’t help as it’s still cased in it’s original casing. still had no time to make all that shifts and ad additional row of buttons but time will come. I just have 3 DIY projects on the table and about 5 synths to restore and mod. And they all have slightly above priority for studio
But as I’ll do anything additional I’ll surely post it here.
Br.
Egor

[EgorParticipant]

Not for now… I’ve replaced all encoder for mentioned above… no case work still.
And this detent issue just makes me mad really. I mean using this encoder means 1 detent 2 notes and that’s not very convinient. To remove detents means to loose ergonomics. And ZAQ didn’t answer about possibility to change firmware to get rid of this behaviour.
BTW I don’t think that this could bring difficulties to normal units as they don’t have detents and nobody would really see any change.

[EgorParticipant]

I’d better shoot everything when It’ll be ready… source of the encoders is one local shop. But those are ordinary ALPS. part number EC12E2420803 ENCODER, VERTICAL, 12MM, 24DET,24PPR

[EgorParticipant]

A bit of update… finally resoldered all encoders… ALPS ones (more quality) with deents… but… One problem I have now… each detent shifts parameters but 2 points not 1 so ergonomics is ruined… And I think there are no such encoders with more detents available…
And here one question rises… if there’s a possibility to tune encoder response in firmware so that encoders with detents would function as they normaly should one point- one point of parameter. This would really bring ergonomics of this sequencer up.

[EgorParticipant]

I just think that offsetting each time loop start so all row’s would be in correct order is some what un-ergonomic and cumbersome especially for live sequencing. Also this could lead to wrong visual interpretation of patterns and fails in changing patterns.
BTW I don’t know how the firmware is build and I’m no programmer at all, but isn’t this custom firmware will just be remapping numbers of encoders in OS and wont hassle with all other code?
I ask that because for eg in midibox firmware (if i remember correctly) You could just remap encoders in one place of code and everything worked correctly. In case You’ve wired something wrong to shifregisters.

[EgorParticipant]

Yes rewiring buttons and ordenary encoder could be done like adding 3rd row of buttons. But shifting PCB’s will need minor customizing (rewiring) of encoders and this could’nt be done by User. All this could lead of course to a next level ZAQ using same hardware and a bit of DIY. But wouldn’t be possible without Zaq’s will and input
But if this experiment is interesting to Zaq I could try all this including all DIY work and then sharing plans with community with my own BCR on my own risk. I surely don’t need it as a controller anyway. So I’m free to experiment.
But anyway it won’t be ergonomic to have encoders row’s shifted without frimware update I mean 1-8 steps under 25-32

[EgorParticipant]

I’m still in planning\ordering stage. But it seems that ALPS EC12E2420803 will fit OK.
http://www.alps.com/prod/info/E/HTML/Encoder/Incremental/EC12E/EC12E2420803.html
And those detents will be great for sequencing (more tactile feedback).
Still the question with buttons is pending because ALPS don’t have simmilar encoder with push on and it’s really favirable to have the same response over all rows.
I’ll share the results and pics when I’ll be done (not only encoder customizing).
If no pushon will be used at least in some near future then it’ll be esear for me to start modding.:) (faster You’ll get pics and modding report ;))

Cheers.

BTW… Still If it would be possible to customize firmware IMHO from ergonomic side it’ll be even cooler to swith PCB’s layout to have all 4 rows of encoder on the upper side and 2 rows of buttons underneath.

[Author]

Posts