Coming Soon: Micro "Circuit Building Block" Kits August 23, 2013 13:39 8 Comments
While I wait for yet another round of Colour prototypes to arrive from the PCB fab house, I've been keeping myself busy laying out little PCBs to perform common "housekeeping" tasks in audio circuits. The idea here is to provide a set of cheap and simple shortcuts to make building, modifying, and prototyping audio gear more painless. These PCBs will also enable DIYers with only a circuit block level of understanding to put together their own circuits.
The first two off the bench are balanced input and output boards. Both boards are based around THAT Corp's state-of-the-art integrated circuits (but also pin compatible with offerings from TI and Analog Devices) and include noise filtering, DC-offset protection, and power supply bypassing. At a tiny 1.4" x 1" (25 x 36mm), the boards are also intended to be small enough to retrofit into your consumer-level, unbalanced gear.
Balanced Line Driver PCB[/caption] Once I have received and tested the boards, PCBs and parts kits will be available from the store. Full kits for each will be around $20.
Comments
Joshua Unitt on November 12, 2014 18:05
Exciting!
Will there be some sort of PCB-mounted terminals for the connector wires, or will they come straight off the board?
Peterson Goodwyn on November 12, 2014 18:05
Good question. The I/O pads are spaced .100" which fits many standard connectors and screw terminals. It’ll be up to you which to use. The kits will most likely come with screw terminals.
Aaron on November 12, 2014 18:05
so I’m going to be racking up 1 or 2 pm700 channels with sc1 pres I built from 5fish… the output of the pm700, however, is unbalanced. now, I could just send the output into a d.I. but then iwould have to make up the gain… I’d rather give out what it will take to drive a trafo on the output. in the mean time, I could use one of these boards as well, correct? just take and point to point your balanced out board into the end of the yamaha circuit.
Peterson Goodwyn on November 12, 2014 18:05
Exactly. You can pull power for the Balanced Output board from either the SC-1 or the PM700 and then just connect the PM700’s unbalanced output to the Balanced Output’s unbalanced in. The BO’s output would go directly to the output jack.
Matt on November 12, 2014 18:05
Interesting. What is the current requirement of the line driver circuit? (Trying to figure out if I can run a bunch of the line drivers off my console PSU without overloading it…)
Peterson Goodwyn on November 12, 2014 18:05
Hey Matt, great question. The THAT1646 line driver draws anywhere from 5-70mA depending on the load it’s driving. Driving typical signals into a typical 10k load, however, you can expect each unit to draw less than 20mA.
Pop on November 12, 2014 18:05
Could we imagine to add a gain/volume to the circuits?
(gain for input blocks & volume for outputs)
I got an old creamware stuff (Luna box) with rca connections (8 ins/8out) that would become very usefull with a few balanced ins/outs (at least 2×2 of them)…
Peterson Goodwyn on November 12, 2014 18:05
Hi Pop,
As is, you cannot aid gain or attenuation (volume) to the building blocks. You would need an extra gain stage for each, and then they are not small kits anymore!
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