Roland D-70
Restoring the Roland D-70 and firmware upgrade

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This is the first in a series of videos that will restore my Roland D-70 to full operational health.

During the assessment video I have identified the following areas where work will be undertaken:

- Replace the battery with a new CR2032 coin cell battery,

- Fix the broken F5 key,

- Fix the lowest key E0,

- Upgrade the firmware from 1.10 to 1.19 which was the final version released prior to support being dropped for the D-70.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

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Accessing the internals of the D-70 is the first task.

I have separated this video out from the rest of the project videos as gaining access is always the first step to any repair work you need to undertake.

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​Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

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In order to repair the bad F key on this D-70 keyboard you need to removed the key bed from the chassis. You could possibly do this repair with the key bed still in the chassis, but it will prove to be much harder. So I have elected to separate the key bed from the chassis.

And this video runs through how the key bed is separated from the chassis.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

-----Coming soon-----

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With the key bed extracted from the D-70 chassis, I can look at what is causing the issue with the F key.

My initial assumption was that the issue was being caused by a spring becoming detached or over extending.

I ended up replacing the spring with a spare I had and then replaced the F key, which appears to have fixed the problem.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

-----Coming soon-----

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While the key bed is out of the D-70 chassis I am going to repair the E0 key that has been damaged by the plug that was originally attached to the D-70 power cord.

This type of damage is the reason I swap the plug / power cord setup for a IEC 13/14 setup. Which I did on this D-70 a few years back when the key got damaged.

I am hoping that I can just get away with sanding the key and then polishing it.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

-----Coming soon-----

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With the work on the D-70 key bed being complete. It needs to be re-installed into the chassis.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

-----Coming soon-----

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An unexpected repair. When I opened the D-70 at the start this project a piece of a circuit board fell out of the chassis.

On inspection this piece of circuit board relates to the edge of the input / output circuit board and luckily their is no connections running across this bit of the circuit board.

So this should just be a simple re-attachment exercise.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.

-----Coming soon-----

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With the key bed of the D-70 fixed it is time to upgrade the firmware version from 1.10 to the last released version 1.19. This is a physical change of the ROM chips in the D-70 that contain the synthesisers operating system.

While i am changing the these ROM's I will remove the battery to ensure that there is no power on the circuit board as a precaution. But as I have removed the battery, i might as well replace it with a new battery.

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Click anywhere on the image or title to see the work undertaken on this synthesiser.