What? Yet another crazy Pugix project. Nonlinear Circuits, located in Australia, designs lots of circuits for modular synthesis with a special emphasis on chaotic and unusual designs. For sale are PC boards and panels for Doing It Yourself. Most of the components are SMD. The panels are in Eurorack format. Some NLC modules are so popular that you can get alternate Eurorack panels. But what Pugix decided to do was to custom design a rack panel with banana jacks. An image of the final panel design is shown above. It follows the same approach I’ve used before, with a long aluminum bracket to hold the PC board that is held to the front panel by the bottom row of banana jacks.

Module List

• Kareishuu VCO x2
• I can’t believe it’s not a VCO Not a VCO
• Dual LFO/VCO LFO/VCO
• Stochaos
• Helvetica Scenario S&H S&H
• Flip-flop chaos
• Squid Axon
• Beat Freq
• Divine CMOS

The bold italicized names above are used on the green panel.

The larger panel real estate taken up by banana jacks vs. eurorack jacks meant that on some modules a few features had to be omitted. Also, due to the lack of switching jacks, a few things had to be done a little differently. These details will be forthcoming, as I make progress posts on this project.

Getting Started

Combining Bills of Material from nine different modules is tedious and error prone. But the first order is already here. I’ve discovered a few parts I missed on the first go. These will come with the next order. The Front Panel Express panel is about to be ordered ($306 USD). I wait until I have most of the parts gathered for such a project before ordering the expensive panel. I did change out one module late in the process.

Today I laid out the PC boards on the aluminum bracket and drilled all the mounting holes. The strategy was to have all the panel-facing sides go face down. These PCB are intended to have the pots and jacks soldered to them. But for this application the pot and jack mounting holes serve to mount the PCB to my bracket. Accomplishing this required drilling out some pot and jack holes to the 1/8″ diameter needed for the nylon standoffs.

As I want the 10-pin Eurorack power headers to be at the back, closer to the power supply (described in the previous post), the orientation of the boards took this into account. Interestingly, there isn’t any convention used by NLC for placement of the 10-pin header (other than it has to be on the back of the module). Sometimes it’s on the top, sometimes on the bottom, and sometimes in the middle.

The wiring plan is simply to run wires from the PC board holes for pots, switches, jacks, and LEDs over to the custom panel. The boards are all located just behind their corresponding panel area.

Another fact is that NLC PC boards come in all different sizes. They are designed with the Eurorack panel part locations in mind of course.

Photo shows the boards mounted in their proper orientation. The four boards below will fit on top of the board above, with circuit connections made by matching header pairs. Fortunately all the headers are 10-pin single inline, which are available in that size. No need to cut. For the two-PCB designs the panel wiring will come from the board underneath.

When the FPE panel arrives, the PCBs will all be removed so that the holes for the jacks can be drilled at the bottom edge of the bracket. The bracket will then be bent 90 degrees and the panel mounted. Meantime I can get started on all that SMD soldering.

UPDATE: Flip-flop Chaos PCB (green) added. Started over with a new 6 x 16.5 inch piece of aluminum.