I’m just impatient to see how this implemented on the front panel board. Still using the good old Mcp23017 (they are expensive these days) ?
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Oh my!! I would buy this in a heartbeat!!!
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Very cool. The new design corrects some of the older flaws, and adds so much more ease of use. It has better access to the SD card and a dedicated headphone amp, to mention two. I broke one SD card trying to remove it; now I use delicate dissection tweezers.
I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere on the Zynthian forum, you can get a ‘Micro SD card extension cable’ so you only have to insert the end into the Zynthian socket once, and then you can easily swap SD cards at the other end.
For V5, yes, still the good MCP23017, although we moved to the QFN-28 package. The price is higher than 2 years ago, but it’s almost the same with every chip.
The V5 control board looks like this:
we put the electronics for every key (RGB LED + 2 x 402 ceramic caps) under the silicone pad:
Note the JST-XH connector labeled as EXT-1. It’s for hardware extensions like CV/Gate module, etc. The pin-out is:
1. GND
2. INT7 (GPIO pin)
3. INT6 (GPIO pin)
4. SCL
5. SDA
6. 5V
Enjoy!
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Be aware that on a pi 4, you need to add additional details to the boot files to make this work.
On my setup, which uses an extender, adding
sdhci.debug_quirks2=4
to the command line file fixes it. (Caution :- Some zynth updates may update the command line and remove your entry)
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Thank you @jofemodo ,
I find the rubber pads (*), the RGB leds with this (see here) and the capacitive footprints on the board very exciting 
I will continue to learn a lot with next Zynthian v5 
(*) are they self made ?
Nice, really promising!
That was to be expected: there is arguably no way to keep prices as they were, before the current state of semiconductors and the things in the world overall…
They are contact paths for the silicone button’s resistive pills. No capacitive sensors on knobs with this version. Perhaps in the future. In fact, we already did some development in this area 
No no. We need to mass-produce the silicone key pad. Doing by hand would be very time-consuming, expensive and unreliable. Our chinese friends are producing this part for us.
Anyway, if you are interested in producing the part by yourself, here is the IGS model:
Z2-3D_mods_01.IGS (4.0 MB)
and the printings:
V5_keypad_printings_albert_02.pdf (12.9 KB)
Regards,
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The first sighting of the green heart in the wild!!
and bold back gets you to the mixer!!
We like change!
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Can the rubber membranes be rotated 90 % to support mounting with encoders at the top so legends are readable in that orientation?
FYI, the improvements in the status bar include:
-
Heart, indicating CPU load. It changes to yellow when load is over 50% and changes to red over 75%
-
Warning/Errors now displayed on top-right, over the heart.
-
Larger area for levels and symbols
-
Separated flags for audio/midi record/play.
Enjoy
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Sorry, i don’t fully understand. Could you elaborate a little bit?
Thanks
Don’t worry. It was a passing thought.
I was thinking of rotating the whole v5 case and obviously the screen orientation as well so that you had a portrait orientated zynthian for some perverse application we haven’t imagined yet. But I see the membrane switches are all in one rubber moulding and are 5 * 4 not 4 * 4 as they were in my imagination…so it’s an obvious no.
So it’s red circle for Audio Record, Blue Circle for MIDI record , green arrow for audio playback, blue arrow for MIDI playback… Nice. The coloured heart is a nice touch.
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Would this allow LED to shine through? How does that work? Does it require an insert?
Of course. Silicone buttons are black coated and laser engraving removes the black coat, uncovering the raw silicone.
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Will I be able to pillage anything from my v4 kit to make v5 or will I have to just buy the kit all over again? Maybe sans RPi?
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