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Looper's Delight
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To those curious about future fcb1010 upgrades: It is VERY UNLIKELY that many of your ideas will ever be incorporated into future firmware releases to the FCB1010. Why such a dismal view? Well, I've reverse engineered the electrical schematic of the FCB1010, and along with several other interested people, reverse engineered the sysex format for saving patches (leading to the software editor now available on my yahoo group FCB_sysex_tool, or on the general FCB yahoo group). In addition I've begun a reverse engineer of the firmware in the FCB1010 with a couple of other interested people (with the idea in mind to do an update ourselves). So I know a lot about how the FCB1010 was designed and implimented. Behringer cut a lot of corners, most likely to maintain some overall target cost of the unit (which is probably the number one reason why the unit sells so well, sadly). They chose a serial EEPROM chip (the main non-volitile storage chip - permanent memory) which is only 2Kbytes big. This is a $1.50 chip. For about $3.00 they could have used a pin-for-pin chip from the same manufacturer which is 64Kbytes big (32 times the storage for only twice the price). Note for all you tweakers that this is a tiny surface mount chip soldered directly on the board, so its not easy for a trained tech to change, let alone a random user. Because the chose a tiny little wimpy memory chip, they had to jump through a lot of hoops in implimentation to get 10 banks of midi data storage out of it. Basically they do not have room to store the data direcly as midi data, they have a simple compression scheme which only allows for their idea of usefull midi data assignments. Their data storage routine is SEVERELY CRIPPLED. There is no possible way to support multiple midi channels for an expression pedal, no way to support sending note messages to more than one midi device, and most importantly, no way to support sending arbitrary strings from a button press. Unfortunately, the way they've designed it, without a complete code redesign, this cannot change. If they redesigned the firmware implimentation (and this would be a huge redesign effort) they could support these things a la the PMC controller. However they'd still have the upper limitation of 2K of non-volitile data, which would mean something more like only being able to use 2 or 3 banks rather than 10. I think this is one more case of a marketing department compromising the overall quality of a final product. By saving that extra $1.50 on the cost of goods, they forced their designers to severely compromise the functionality of the product. Who really knows what would have happened if they put more memory in there, and released a product that could be upgraded over time, but was more expensive. Maybe they wouldn't have sold as many if it was more expensive. Or maybe there would be lots of people wanting to do esoteric midi stuff drooling over it and buying two. Basically you can't have your tea and eat it too - either cost or functionality, its always a big question. Bottom line: Keep sending your ideas to Behringer. They need to know what their customer wants so they can design good products. But don't expect results any time soon. They've designed themselves into a cost cutting corner, which they could only get out of by issuing new and improved hardware. Jon