While making a godawful racket with the System 100 on Saturday, I switched to PWM on the 102 VCO and the pulse width stayed unmodulated. The LFO light didn’t light, no matter how much I waggled the slider. Hmph.
Should be easy to sort out a broken LFO, right? I’ve built all the bits of a 102 on stripboard, so surely I should be able to fix it?
Fretting that it wouldn’t be as easy as all that, I peered at the schematic.
None of the outputs were working, so I reckoned the problem was in the tri-core, either the capacitor or the op-amp. Just to check, I measured the output of IC301, and it was pinned high.
At this point feeling strangely optimistic, I enlisted the help of my son, who was bored enough to come and watch/help/encourage/take the piss as appropriate. Is dad gonna be able to fix this thing?
I yanked out the CA1458G in IC301 with a desoldering gun:
I bunged a socket in, and replaced it with an MC1458 I had in the bits box. So far, so good.
Switched it on, and…
…it worked straight-away. WHOOOP.
I probably should have measured all the voltages and given it a bit of a once-over before I put it all back together, but my son was keen to start making some horrible noises, so I just had time for a couple of slightly wobbly bonus photos: here’s the VCO board – see all the keyboard specific components left unpopulated:
and here’s the ring-mod/S&H board
It’s missing the circuit board annotations that my 101 keyboard has, and the soldering on the back is without solder resist (more like earlier System 700s, or my SH-5). The serial number starts with 46, so according to that Boss serial number lookup chart, it was made in May 1976. My 101 keyboard serial is 60xxxx, which works out to be July 1977.
Here’s my Sys101 VCF/VCA for comparison.
I’ve not gone over the board to see if there are any differences in terms of components; there’s nothing extra soldered on to the back of the 102 VCF/VCA board, which suggests probably not. I pulled out the circuit board for my 104 sequencer recently, and it has a different circuit board layout to the one in the manual, with a load of bodged extra capacitors soldered to the back.