SRJV: To Wi-Fi Or Not To Wi-Fi

I’ve seen occasional emails in my contact form asking about it, so I’ll start this blog by disclosing one thing: yes, I have put in some research into Roland SR-JV80 ROM images and am responsible for the GitHub repo that makes it possible to create your own.

This in mind, for the sake of keeping this blog alive, unlike when I switched web hosts, the focus of this post will be on the options for how to make use of them.

My interest has gotten to the point that I’ve assisted Sector101 with researching the ROM formats and provided what’s likely the first public custom ROM to his library: a compilation of the Roland SL-JD80 cards (whose patches will only work in the JD-990 due to the unique patch structure), and have consequently bought a few of his older ROM boards and programmer. More recently, however, I was informed of a Chinese endeavor of making their own competition. This particular product has the selling point of having Wi-Fi functionality to make it possible to change ROM data without uninstalling it from a synthesizer, though I’ll discuss that aspect later in this post.

This in mind, when a friend informed me that a batch was in stock, the dev of the Wi-Fi board was generous enough to send me one for free as a sample. Setup seemed fairly straightforward in that no additional hardware was needed.

Sadly, that’s where the 100% guaranteed pros over Sector101’s effort ended. The board arrived with it set to full power by default, which almost bricked my Roland JD-990 due to overcurrent, so I had to set it to mid-power mode at highest (its advertised Bluetooth wakeup before turning on Wi-Fi is the only other option left to reprogram it unless you physically uninstall it from a given synth).

Alas, a few days ago, I discovered even that was demanding too much power. An hour after powering on, I was noodling around for sound design purposes for a personal project, and the 990 completely bricked on me, and with an unusually high temperature as well. Uninstalling the board (and replacing the internal CR2032 battery for good measure), I’ve failed to reproduce this major problem since, though I might manage the courage to look into re-capping further down the road to be on the safe side.

As popular as the Wi-Fi board is proving to be the past few months, it needs to be said that it does have some disadvantages as well, some of which could fry your synth. The way I view it is that it’s a tradeoff between price and convenience vs. durability. The Wi-Fi board is convenient and (for now) cheaper than what Sector101 offers, but its selling point of reprogramming on the fly isn’t safe for the units. On the other hand, Sector101’s offering I’ve failed to notice any power issues, but it is more costly, no thanks to needing an additional Arduino-based programmer purchase to get to work fully.

This is not to say the Wi-Fi board was a waste of space for me, however: it is convenient, and even the BLE wakeup mode could fully cooperate in a synth that needs more draw due to more SRJV slots anyway (will confirm in my XV3080 later). And since it allegedly will be made open source later, it could mean more room for improvement with more contributors. Still, the gist of this post is to tell everyday customers to wait and see given how new this technology is.