JP6 filter breadboarding

The last of the three filters I intend to do (at least initially) for the XM8 is on my breadbord. Well, partially anyway.

I have had so much trouble getting it to work, to the point where I ripped it apart and started over. Even then, I could not get it right. The times I could see a signal it quickly latched up etc.

Last night I finally got parts of it up and running after swapping out some opamps and going over the wirings again. I had among other things connected the I_abc of one of the cells to its own output, and connected a cap to the input instead of the output of another. Sigh. I am getting a bit stressed as my wife is having a baby sometime in May, so I'm pushing on to get the filter finished by then. Guess I'm a bit too tired!

Unfortunately, even if I could get a good signal for parts of the range, when the cutoff CV pot was above halfway I only got a lot of weird stuff.

I am currently using a 4x multiplier for the CV to get a full cutoff range. In my simulations, I got some strange oscillation on the signal at about 5.5V CV, which corresponds approximately to this point - which made me suspect that this was my problem.

And here I did what I had promised myself not to do until I had a working prototype: I looked at the System 80 Jove schematics. Sadly, they were almost identical to mine (no surprise there, as both are based on the Jupiter 6 service manual), but the Jove filter uses J112 JFETs instead of the opamp buffers.

I noticed that it also used 18k resistors on the OTA controls where I use 10k. I tried replacing the resistors in my simulation, and now the oscillation stopped - simply because the Iabc would never get high enough for the oscillation to start.

I did measure the cutoff for some currents in my simulation:

with 10k resistors:

5V: 593mA, 17kHz
5.5V: 1mA, 26kHz
6V: 1.37mA, 33kHz (oscillation)

with 18k resistors:

5V: 17kHz
5.5V: 21kHz
6V: 21kHz

Now, I tried replacing the resistors on the breadboard as well, but it didn't really change anything.

So, next up, I gave up on the TL082s. I only have two TL072s left and I suspect they are broken, so I hooked up a TL074 and ran wires to it. And suddenly the circuit worked! However, I did get the same oscillation, but sooner than expected.

I then replaced the 18k resistors with 10k again. This time the oscillation was gone!

But then, when I put my multimeter across the resistor to measure current, it returned - but only at very high cutoff.

More over, I realised that one of the 18k resistors had in fact been 1.5k. So my guess is that when the resistors are too different, one of the cells amplify more than the others and we get problems like this.

Anyway, I'm happy that I could get the filter working, and even better, that it worked at very high frequencies (>30kHz).