I was late to make DIY builds of the Synthesis Technology e560 and e580 modules. A post on the Synthtech email list alerted me to Dave Brown’s builds.
I had heard about these DSP modules when they came out about three years ago in Eurorack format. I didn’t know that Paul Schreiber was still offering the DIY kits in summer 2014, but he was and I purchased one each. I obtained the excellent Front Panel Express panel files designed by Dave Brown and ordered those, too. The only remaining parts for the project were panel jacks, attenuator pots, knobs and one switch. Here’s a photo of the assembled and tested boards, as delivered from SynthTech:
Four pots and one switch are soldered onto the board and serve to mount it behind the standard Eurorack panel, like so:
Putting these into 5U panels required removing the switch and pots from the boards. After a struggle with the first pot, I developed a technique to suck solder out of the holes around the mounting table and then rock them out gently, after desoldering or cutting the leads. Like Dave Brown did, I installed 3-pin MTA headers to make all connections to the panel, so that no wires would have to be soldered to the PC boards.
The trickiest part was finding a way to mount the board to a bracket, since the boards have no mounting holes. Dave had drilled corner holes, but I deemed that too much risk of damage to the multilayer PC board. Instead, I used six of the holes that formerly held the pot tabs and found that size 3-48 screws from Ace Hardware were just small enough to tap into them without much fuss. (A 3-48 screw is in between a 2-56 and a 4-40 in diameter.)
Here’s a photo of the empty panels:
Here are all the parts laid out, prior to assembly.
Subsequent posts will describe each of these modules in detail.
