Project: 4MS Rotating Clock Divider

Notes


It’s a testimony to the quality of this eurorack module kit, that adding this as a project almost feels like a cheat. The 4ms Rotating Clock Divider is a clever and compact thing which allows you to make funky divisions of a master clock to trigger events elsewhere in your modular world, with the bonus of some trickery when voltages are applied to the Rotate input.

I confess – I built this kit as it was about a third of the retail price of the manufactured version, and I’d heard lots of tales of how easy this is to construct. In fact, I think the design has been amended to make assembly even easier. The kit comes with an excellent set of instructions full of pictures making each step clear. Beyond the RCD chip which drives this little beast, there were some unusual components I’d never come across before, resistor arrays – I confess, still don’t know what they really do, but they’re pretty...

Assembly took in the region of 2.5 hrs, and would have been under 2 hours if I hadn’t made one simple mistake – the panel is connected to the PCB by the jack sockets, which are right angled to allow a simple join to the board. However, while soldering them in place, I failed to notice that while the jacks were flush with the PCB at one end, they were perhaps 1mm ajar at the other. I spent half an hour trying to fix this before deciding it was a largely cosmetic issue (thankfully, that was the case), but I had succeeded in making a simple kit slightly complicated.

The one other mistake I made was a slip while solder the input LED in place, which managed to melt it. No lights, although the unit was working. I desoldered the dead LED, and put in a low light version I had lying around, which is dimmer than the supplied versions, but works fine (and may actually make the module a little less blinging, such that you can focus on the divisions, without the glare of the white LED. I may be kidding myself here...!)

So, cool module, easy build – what’s not to like? Just got to get my head around the Rotate now...

Results Pass