Interesting that he mentions the Dave Smith Instruments (now Sequential) Prophet 12. I have a Prophet P08, and have opened it up to repair it, and it is a work of design elegance. It contains five boards, each connected via an easily removed ribbon cable, attached to a metal body with just a few screws. You can trivially remove all the boards, and in fact I did exactly this to ship the boards to the company for a minor repair rather than shipping the entire unit.
Another work of design beauty was the NeXTstation, NeXT's pizza-box shaped workstation. A solid magnesium case with an elegant molded heat sink on bottom, opens with a single screw in the back. Inside there's a fan (two screws), a power supply attached directly to the case over the heat sink (one screw), a mount for the floppy drive (one screw), a mount for the hard drive (one screw), and the motherboard (one or two screws). And that's it -- that's the entire thing! You can break down the entire machine in less than five minutes. Did I mention it's made of solid magnesium?
Funny, I have a DSI PolyEvolver, and when one voice decided to go on the fritz with an intermittent issue, I couldn't find a schematic anywhere (that's because DSI hasn't made a technical service manual available for years). Not that other synth manufacturers are more forthcoming with service manuals, but they are at least "available", which helps immensely when troubleshooting. DSI was very helpful, but in the end, the issue turned out to be a lead-free solder joint issue on one the DSP legs (early lead-free solder was prone to cracking under repeated heating and cooling cycles).
Not sure what the article is implying by saying the Prophet has interesting silkscreen designs or instructions - that may help remove the right components to send back to DSI, but doesn't help someone diagnose and repair the board themselves. Oh, also, I have successfully replaced the battery in a Sonicare toothbrush without destroying it - still working to this day.
If you get frustrated with your PolyEvolver, feel free to ship it directly to me :-)
Seriously though, I build patch editors in my spare time (https://github.com/eclab/edisyn) and would really like to make an editor for the PolyEvolver.
The PolyEvolver is one of my favourites - the sounds haven't 'aged' much, unlike most of the 90s synths; would be difficult to let that one go!
Woah - you wrote and maintain Edisyn? Excellent software, and pretty much vital to the productivity (and sanity) of synthesists worldwide; thanks very much for your work!
I use Edisyn for my Kawai K3 (which has an unusable button-and-dial interface for wavetable editing), although it's not on your list in GitHub for some reason. I have the SoundTower PolyEvolver editor, and it's quite functional (albeit within a quirky interface). It also 'unlocks' custom user wavetables, which is helpful. Not sure if that influences your decision to tackle another editor, but I'm sure it would round out your DSI list (and the MonoEvolver would be a natural leader/follower).
Yes, I wrote Edisyn. Hmm, Edisyn has never had a K3 editor; it's on my list if I ever come across a unit. It's got a K1, K4 and K5 editor. How are you using Edisyn with your K3?
Apologies - I just looked for the software and can't seem to find it on my machine - may have been on an old iPad, but not likely to have been your excellent software.
Very trivial to include a bill of materials and/or a link to the schematic on most PCB's I do it with all my industrial designs but it doesnt necessarily help if 99% of the logic is in the microcontroller flash unless you also publish documented source code. Once you've done that it is game over as a business as it will be copied mercilessly unless you have some sort of "platform as a service" or ability to exclude copies.
A BOM would be lovely and glad that you include a link right on the board, but isn't a showstopper - most components are fairly obvious on inspection/testing (not so much when manufacturers sand off/exclude/obscure IC identifiers), but a list would definitely be a huge timesaver. A schematic is almost essential though - I think the PolyEvolver board is 6 layers and would take ages to map out.
Oddly enough, someone else mentioned the other day that Sequential started a cloud-based service for converting wavetables to a usable format for the new Pro3 [0] - it's free now, but maybe a service after DSI was bought out by Focusrite?
As for source code, updates are still downloadable from DSI, plus the microcontroller has an I2C or JTAG interface and isn't protected AFAIK; wouldn't be overly difficult to extract the source (albeit in machine code). I think I previously ordered backups of the DSP and microcontroller when they were still available - just in case, but there are a bunch of components that aren't available from DSI or supply shops anymore (e.g., the custom CEM chips). I think that's an aspect of the right to repair that may be overlooked - component availability.
Another work of design beauty was the NeXTstation, NeXT's pizza-box shaped workstation. A solid magnesium case with an elegant molded heat sink on bottom, opens with a single screw in the back. Inside there's a fan (two screws), a power supply attached directly to the case over the heat sink (one screw), a mount for the floppy drive (one screw), a mount for the hard drive (one screw), and the motherboard (one or two screws). And that's it -- that's the entire thing! You can break down the entire machine in less than five minutes. Did I mention it's made of solid magnesium?
How NeXT/Apple has fallen.