HX3.5 Installation Manual

Preface

June 26th, 2018

HX3 should be installed by a qualified technician only. You should be familiar with ribbon cable mounting, crimp contact installation and soldering of delicate parts. Important: Boards contains static sensitive components. Be sure to use anti-static tools and grounded soldering toolset.

Power Supply

The board may be powered either from coaxial DC input PL10 (5.5/2.1 mm plug, DC 9V 500mA wall wart) or from green DC connectors PL12 (9 to 12V input) or PL11 (5V input; 5V output when power provided to DC jack PL10 or PL12). Voltages exceeding 5.2V on PL11 will destroy the board!

After powering on, a red LED near PL17 will flicker briefly; it will also flicker when the HX3.5 controller is busy. When the RealOrgan Sound Engine is ready, a yellow LED will dim; it will "breathe" with rotary simulation speed. When the Effects/GM DSP is ready, a blue LED will flash every second. The blue LED will blink when the DSP is ready to accept a DFU firmware update by USB.

Updating Firmware

New Firmware and FPGA image (Sound Engine) is installed using a standard SD or SDHC card. For this purpose, an SD card adapter is provided with every board. Attch SD card adaptor cable to PL17.

An update will start automatically on power-on when a file called "autorun.ini" is found on SD card. The update may be started manually by menu as well. A list of available update options (INI scripts) are displayed; select by MenuPanel encoder knob. A script is started by pressing the encoder knob for about 2 seconds.

As of today, the effects/GM DSP (firmware, GM sound banks) may be updated through USB only.

Firmware images are made available through our Github repository.

Use as MIDI Expander

The HX3.5 board is configured as a simple MIDI Expander from factory. Do not connect any peripherals to black ribbon cable connectors except a MenuPanel to PL21.