GTC

GTC is the short form for Gate/Trigger Conditioner. This small box is intended to accept nearly any signal, which should be a gate or trigger signal and output it as a well-defined signal suitable even for those machines which need very strong signals.

	I made this box for a friend, who always had gate/trigger problems with machines like ARP. So after testing some things on the breadboard and developing some circuit fragments, it was time to start building the box with the desired configuration. Not much electronics is needed, so an enclosure i had around here was used.
	The basic things is preparing the enclosure, cutting the veroboards in the right size ans solder the connectors to it. 3 Boards are used, each one keeps 3 conditioner blocks, each having an input and an output.
	So let's start to build the electronics. Yes, i'm sort of proud of this project, as i introduced a new workflow with this. The project was small enough to do all the planning and documentation before starting to work on anything of it. All this was done over a weekend.
	All 3 boards are completed now. The circuitry is quite simple...
	...which also keeps the wiring on the lower side of the board simple enough to do most with the wires. I like using the wires of the components as traces. This is okay for resistors and so, components that rarely get a problem. Unsoldering a transistor when its wires are bent to form the traces is no real fun, so it's useful to think about what component wires will form traces. Needless to say that ICs always should go into sockets.
	Testing the basic functionality on the workbench first
	Now this is how the 3 boards are wired together. They just need power inside, which is distributed from one board via 2 simple wires going across those 3 boards.
	Final testing in the studio, all conditioners connected in series, LFO signal from the Elektor Formant fed into the first input, an LED on the output. This setup just ran for some hours to see if something goes wrong. This was the final test of the unit.

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