Staying sane with missing cables

One trick to stay sane while writing a book is to fixate on something completely unimportant at the same time. One part of my brain is trying to explain JavaScript while another part is frantically trying to remember where I put the USB 2.0 Type A Female to USB B Male cable that I use to connect my Synthstrom Deluge to usb MIDI devices. I have absolutely no need to connect my Deluge to a MIDI keyboard at the moment, but that’s not the point. I’m getting regular exercise breaks too as I get up and look in places that the cable might be.

By mid afternoon I snapped and ordered an adapter which does the same job as the cable. Cost: two pounds fifty pence. Of course, now I’ll have to find something else to worry about.

The writing itself is going fine, which is the important thing.

Fixing my Deluge

My Synthstrom Deluge is on of my favourite instruments. I bought it second hand a while back and I’ve had some great fun making music and rhythm patterns with it. However some of the buttons and encoders have been a bit intermittent of late. The good news is that the word on the street is that this is all very fixable and spares are readily available at reasonable prices. I ordered the parts a while back and this week they arrived, all the way from New Zealand where the Deluge is made.

Today I spent a lovely two hours stripping down the device, replacing two rotary encoders and all of the rubber buttons.

This is a close up of the circuit board. The “star” around each led provides the contacts which are connected by a conductive material on the underside of each button. Some of the stars were a bit grubby, but they cleaned up fine with a bit of isopropyl alcohol.

This is the board with all new keys, ready to go back into the case. It works perfectly now.