As an exercise for me to learn tracing, I created a simple project that may be interesting for some of you.
It’s a power board that I want to use as backpack with some of my designs. Ala lzx, but designed in diy style and quality.
It generates +5, -5, +1 and 2.5 Volts and shares them in two rows of 2.54 headers spaced apart so that they also fit on a bradboard.
Anybody see other voltages useful?
If there’s enough interest, I could open source it.
I’ll be building some, let me know if you’d want any.
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Congrats! Learning some PCB design was one of the best things I’ve done in the past few years and it’s been extremely useful and fulfilling for me, so I hope it is for you too!
I was thinking about making something similar, so I’m interested! And I have some random thoughts/comments/questions/suggestions/ramblings…
For something intended to plug into a breadboard, I’d suggest minimizing how much of the breadboard it will cover. If you can make it so it just plugs into and covers a few rows and then sticks off the board, I think that’s better than covering a lot of rows and not sticking off the board. The more of the breadboard you can leave free, the more space for breadboarding. Also it’s been my experience that if you have a lot of pins into the breadboard on a piece, it can make it pretty hard to push into and pull out of a breadboard.
It’s a good idea to label what’s supposed to come out of (or hook up to) what pins, when making a module intended to connect to something else (like a breadboard). My very first PCBs I made for my self were some simple boards with jacks on that plugged into a breadboard, but I ended up throwing them away (and revising them) because my first run wasn’t labeled and I could never remember which pins on my adapter went to ground on the jacks and which went to the tips.
Are the rows of holes wired up like the 1x8 headers in your diagram? If so, is there any particular reason you’ve done them like that? If there is no particular reason to having them like that, have you considered having them as small buses with female headers? For instance, you could have a 1x4 female header devoted to each power connection, so a 1x4 for +5V, a 1x4 for -5V, a 1x4 for +2.5V, a 1x4 for +1V, and a 1x4 for GND, and it wouldn’t take up very much space. Since you use wires or something like dupont cables on a breadboard, which are both essentially male-to-male connectors, it makes sense to me to have female connectors on this power module to plug into. Then you could have the board plug into just a few rows (2? 3?) of the breadboard purely for structural connection instead of 1+ rows of the breadboard being used for each power connection.
Small pet peeve of mine: I think it’s a good idea to label eurorack power connections with a -12V next to any “red stripe” or “red” labels, just to be clear. The -12V really is the actual important bit, while the red stripe means pretty much nothing, especially if a cable is made wrong or the other end is plugged in wrong. Also, related to that, if you want to put a keyed header then the space where you currently have “red” written will probably be covered up by the header. Actually R2 might be in the way of a keyed header, too, and if it’s not, it’s probably real close right next to the header.
(I’m not always good at tactfully giving advice, so if any of my suggestions come off as rude, I apologize and did not mean it like that. Feel free to ignore anything I said, I won’t mind!)
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