www.megadrum.info

I've taken a variety of high-quality photos of my Alesis Trigger IO disassembled. I thought it might be of mild interest to some of you to see what a retail product board looks like. And also thought some of the electronics gurus here might enjoy seeing what components and build quality is inside the box.

Taken with an 8MP Canon SD1100 IS mounted to a tripod and using macro mode with no flash. I had a bit of trouble lighting the board evenly but I think the images will be totally usable. I can take more as long as the requests are made in the next few calendar days as I plan on putting it back together soon so I don't misplace the pieces or break it.

One question that's surely to be askes is what the hell the white "goop" is that appears to be spilled on the bottom of the main board PCB. Your guess is as good as mine, that's what it was like when I removed the four side chassis screws and removed the top. If I come down with some exoctic Asian disease call the CDC and tell them to inspect my Trigger IO main board.

COLLECTION OF PHOTOS IN A 31.8 MB ZIP FILE AVAILABLE BY CLICKING HERE

Usually that "goop" is put there by the manufacturer to make it as difficult as possible to reverse engineer their product. They do it all the time with guitar effects pedals. I am in the process of downloading your pictures now so I haven't seen them yet, but that would be my guess.

Nope, that just looks like someone spilled their milk on it! The "Goop" I'm talking about is usually on the component side and thick.

Another cluttered (meaning expensive) op-amp design.

The gloop on the capacitor isn't to discourage hacking otherwise they wouldn't have fitted J10 – which seems to be the 8051 programming header. Gloop is used here to stop the component falling off the board when it's soldered – other surface mounted parts are held in place by the solder paste.

It's also used now instead of wax impregnated foam to stop things buzzing.

Ken Forgettable wrote:Another cluttered (meaning expensive) op-amp design.

And yet it sells for $150. A cost that has to cover more than just parts and the build house. It has to include profit, marketing, R&D time and what not.

Not saying you're wrong, just mentioning that as far as commercial TMI devices go, this one sells on the bottom end of the price range.

That thing looks a lot more complicated than Megadrum. Is there something that it can do that MD can't? It seems like MD beats it in both features and simplicity.

Rubis wrote:That thing looks a lot more complicated than Megadrum. Is there something that it can do that MD can't? It seems like MD beats it in both features and simplicity.

My thoughts exactly Rubis. I was wondering about that myself.

And Ken Forgetable, I don't think that Gastric was talking about that capacitor goop, I think he was talking about the white milky looking substance on the bottom of the board. Kind of goes from one end of the board to the other. I believe I stated in a previous post that it wasn't "hacking goop". Just clearing that up.

I have no electronics experience so I cannot shoot any direct comparisons between MD and the Trigger IO on a hardware scale. Obviously the IO uses much smaller PCB components in general. But everyone is correct, it looks a lot more "complicated" in general. Tons of traces everywhere, lots of little components everywhere.

I think the most interesting part of the board is the stacked TRS jacks, on/off, etc. directly mounted to the main PCB. And the stacked input jacks are on there rock solid. I tried briefly to pry to top one off the bottom one to see if there was some identifying label on the jack, and to see what the intermediary bridge piece was between the stacked jacks. But regardless it seems like a great way to mount the jacks to the PCB. And the fact they stack so tightly would help facilitate squeezing more input jacks into a smaller chassis much easier. I probably spent as much time stripping the IDE cable and soldering it to my input jacks as I did populating the entire V2.8 PCB with components. On the flip side of all of the jacks/etc. were directly on the board it would limit your chassis selection, and then you'd require some sort of printable rear-panel template to accurate drill out the necessary holes properly. Though that'd be a time/problem saver I'd think.

But I still think it'd be an excellent modification to consider for the Synthex V2.9 board - the ability to solder input, on/off, etc. directly to the board. Just like you do with the USB jack currently. Save a lot of internal wiring. I know my chassis is a scary mess of wires.

And now that I'm thinking about how thin and weak those IDE wires are I'm thinking I need to somehow secure them so they don't simply break over time from the strain of their own weight.

I think to some extent that synthex has done that with his input jacks board. They could probably be a little tighter, but it really does tidy up the inside of your case. It gets rid of a lot of the speghetti look that comes with wiring the jacks directly. I think what keeps this idea of being more feasible is the fact that people use so many different kinds of enclosures so a universal mounting design may not be practical. Just my two cents.

Unfortunately you have to DIY the jacks boards. After failing to DIY my V2.5 board I just left the jacks boards I created out of the build entirely to negate them as a potential problem.

But having the jacks on the main PCB wouldn't force you to a universal enclosure. It would just potentially prevent you from having the jacks on the top of your enclosure since they'd be physically attached to the board and now you'd have to have your board mounted verticly. You could provide the best of both worlds by mounting an IDE connector to the main PCB as well as providing jack mounts. Then users could use whichever they want. Just throwing out thoughts.