702 and 705 boards arrive

Fresh Roland System 700 705 ADSR clone  PCBs

Two weeks later and the VCO and ADSR boards have arrived from iTeadStudio, and they look great. Went for 1.6mm rather than 1.2mm thick boards this time, so they look a bit less luminously green:

Fresh Roland System 700 702 VCO clone  PCBs

The dual envelope board is the same size as the VCA, but the VCO board just seems massive at 15x15cm. Here they are next to a Doepfer SEM filter for comparison:

Comparing the size of the System 700 VCO board with the Doepfer SEM filter,

Nearly big enough to eat your dinner off. Once again nearly zero skill or invention involved, just shamelessly copying the same layout as the originals, only with any extra components that would have been bodged in on the originals added as standard.

Apart from the extra silkscreening and a few extra test holes for ground and power, the only other change is that I’ve included holes for a 15-way 0.1″ socket rather than the possibly unreliable edge connector from the original. I’m intending to use something from Molex KK range, if I only I can manage to order the right thing from Farnell.

I’ve started populating a couple of the VCO boards already, 100 resistors soldered last night, some way to go yet.

10 comments

  1. 1st March 2015Rob Keeble says:

    Hi, looks like great progress! Did you have any problems getting the 703b filter working? I have built a couple but had problems getting all modes to work well. I am building a 700 clone as a long term project and have done the 703B, 705, 706. I am using resynthesis panels and have the 705 as a cp sized panel using 30mm sliders. The 705 ski is accurate. Best regards. Rob

  2. 1st March 2015ua726 says:

    It started out massively distorted but the (stripboarded) 703b is working well enough for me now, although the res boost is still a mystery, it swamps the original signal so much that it’s better without it. I’ll post my write-up later once I’ve done some quick demo recordings.

  3. 1st March 2015ua726 says:

    Now I check my notes, on the 703b R33 should be 1K, but I don’t know if that’ll solve your problem. Good to know the 705 schematic is right though it might take me a few weeks to get round to building it.

  4. 6th September 2015Juan Telway says:

    ummmm….. how the hell do i get myself some of these AMAZING PCBS!!!!! please let me know ASAP!

  5. 7th September 2015ua726 says:

    No plans to make these commercially available in their current form at the moment, although I might publish some de-Roland-logo’d Gerbers somewhere. Also still haven’t actually tested the 705 boards yet, I’ve been busy with other things.

    Even more also, the upcoming Roland System 500 series will probably cover most of the 700 territory.

  6. 9th June 2016geoff says:

    Hi , I’m a newbie to this PCB fabrication thingy and want to know , did you just photo copy the roland pcb layout–minus logo–from the service manual , or do you need a complete redraw of same , and then how do you get a gerber file from that.
    Sorry , told you I was a newbie , thanks in advance.

  7. 9th June 2016ua726 says:

    I’ve been redrawing, which is possibly the most tedious route, but given the cost of getting the PCBs made up, it felt like the most reliable.

    There might be a way of getting more accurate-to-the-original tracks by some PDF-to-Gerber-type magic (maybe pdf2gerb?) but I haven’t tried it. Also I wanted to use DIP-packaged opamps rather than the cans on the original.

    There’s some pictures here, but essentially I redraw the schematic in Kicad first, then I overlay the parts diagram on the track layout and notate the part numbers in Fireworks or something (so I know where the various parts should go). Then I export the netlist from Kicad and convert it for use in OsmondPCB, which is nice because it allows for curved traces and also pasting the original track layout as a background to trace from.

    As I lay out the tracks OsmondPCB checks my layout against the schematic, so if the original track layout and the schematic disagree with each other I can go back to Kicad to fix it and re-export the net list.

    Once I’m done in OsmondPCB I can export the Gerbers, have a look at them in an online Gerber previewing tool, and then I bite the bullet and send it off for manufacture.

    I’m sure it’s more long-winded than it needs to be, but I’ve seen someone going straight for copying the track layout and getting it wrong.

    Having PCBs done is expensive, so I’ve started doing a couple of the boards that I only need one or two of on stripboard using Veecad, and that’s been working out quite well, even though Veecad itself isn’t terribly pretty. Being able to automatically check the layout against a netlist makes it worthwhile over the otherwise better looking DIY Layout Creator.

    Hopefully I’ve not made it sound too hard – it’s not really.

  8. 11th March 2017Mike Fiction says:

    Is it possible to get a photo of both sides of your boards? I’d like to clone these pcbs myself and I don’t mind making them, but a photo of the trace side would be super helpful to get me started. Or even the roland traces – does the service manual have the traces? I can’t seem to find anything but the schematics online and photos of the tops of the PCBs.

  9. 11th March 2017ua726 says:

    emcloned has most of the Roland scans

  10. 11th March 2017Mike Fiction says:

    Thank you! I didn’t know about that msg board

Write a comment: