Yocto

My son’s been getting really into producing UK hip hop/grime recently and we talked about getting him a drum machine. A couple of months before his 15th birthday, Pusherman offered up a serious bargain on a complete Yocto kit, so I grabbed it.

Pusherman had already populated the I/O board and IC sockets, but there was still a ton of work to do!

Pretty daunting boards!!

I started stuffing the voices – I had to work in secret at night because I wanted to surprise my son.

Eventually, I completed the bottom side of the main board.

There were just a few bits left to do on the I/O board, so I completed that.

I was pretty happy with the soldering job overall. I’d taken my time and it was very neat.

I added all the hardware to the top side of the board. Starting to look familiar now.

I connected up the I/O board, before putting it in it’s case and testing it all out.

Initially, I found only two issues. Firstly, the hi-hats weren’t working. On investigation, one of the electrolytics in the hi-hat circuit was very hot, so I removed it and found a solder short underneath. I replaced the cap and the hi-hats were sounding great!

The other problem was with the bass drum. Everything seemed to be working, but there was no bass ? It all sounded really thin.

I spent a good 3 hours with a multimeter/scope, switched out a few components, and couldn’t find anything wrong. I was about to give up and have a little cry when I noticed the low cut was activated on my mixer channel. Yeah, go on, I’ll let you have a little chuckle at that, I deserve it!

Anyway, my son was over the moon with his 808 ?