Friday, January 2, 2009

assembling stephanie

Had a couple weeks away and was a welcome break from soldering, cutting and filing. Day 1 of 2009 and was back into it with half steam and a cracking hangover but, that's the only way you get shit done!


Success! We have liftoff for Phase 1!!!


All that's pending now are the RGB button tops and the top face plate. The faceplate I'll have in the next week or 2 - the layout for that is ready to go but I think the guys I'm outsourcing it to are not back till another week so I can wait. The buttons are another thing - I've decided to put this into "Phase 2" of the project - as there is a bit of work to this but I've pretty much mapped it all out in my head so shouldn't be more than 2-3 weeks work to complete.


So now I'm spending time with the deck assembled and working and getting to understand it, programing it and work with configuring my music apps to interface with it, so there's some weeks just there alone before I'm ready to bling it up with nice LED's.


Have to say I'm well chuffed with where it's all ended up at - it's been a milestone and I can't say how pleasing it is to have come so far and have a positive outcome! I've put some pics here of the final assembly stages, hope it helps!







Starting with just the housing, rear MIDI & power mounts and power supply.







Adding DIN modules.







Adding AIN modules.







Adding the Cores.







Bolting in bulkheads.







Adding master section pots and button channel strips. Things start to get complicated and beginning to notice a lack of space for wires and so on...holding breath and hoping for the best.







Adding channel strip pots. Now I'm shitting myself and are in a sweat about how many damn cables there are - I guess I didn't give this enough thought because there just isn't enough room for everything to fit in it seems - and it's too late to go back and re-design the layout! This is one of those lessons that no matter how much you plan and prepare, you're gona screw shit up at some point if you're not experienced!







Well after some serious cable management I finally got the channel strips to sit flush down on the bulkhead mounts. At first the whole thing sat about 1cm above the mounts which was disaster really, because it would mean a total re-work of the housing to allow the front panel to mount. I ended up having to put a lot of force down on this in the end and are not entirely happy about it but nothing else has to go in that section now so I should be ok (DOUT modules will sit under the master section buttons).







Bolt everything in tight and we have liftoff! Programmed it all and got the MBLink feature to work and a shitload of debugging (had to rip it all apart and put together about 5 times to fix solder shorts, resolder pot connectors, replace blown pots and other crap) -in the end it was a lot of work but TOTALLY worth it! WOOHOO!!!