Cheap Bastard: Busboards are easy

Finally, I get some time to myself. But not much, so let’s crack-on.

First I connected-up the PSU to the mains. Now, if you are going to try this yourself I shouldn’t have to tell you to be careful, but I will anyway. BE CAREFUL. I’m not responsible if you fry yourself.

Anyway, I took no chances for first power-up. I stood well back and used a stick to switch it on, and I’m not ashamed of it 😛

But it works. So, out comes the multimeter to measure the veracity of the advertised voltages.

All looking good. Nice and stable output, no vibration and barely audible noise. The trimpot allows quite accurate tuning, however, it affects all three busses at once, and there is slight variation between them. Not a big deal?

Next was to grab some stripboard, a couple of large capacitors and suitable headers. It turned out that I ordered the wrong IDC connectors. So I have female connectors for the busboard, and male cable clamps. But this is no problem, as they can easily undergo a sex change with the help of some spare pin headers.

The connectors are wired as follows:

Initially I won’t be using the +5 bus, so I’ll only need the 10-pin headers. Stripboard makes it easy to follow the busses, and the whole thing took just a few minutes. This is just a first run. I’ll probably reinforce the tracks later. But as it is there seem to be no problems.