SammichSID (Part 3)

Today I started on mounting the leds on the front panel PCB. To get them in the right length you first have to temporary mount the front panel on the PCB. But first you have to put all the leds in the PCB because they will go in between. To get the alignment of the front panel right you also have to put the buttons on the switches. Then you can turn everything upside down and stick the leds one by one through the holes in the front panel and then solder the leads from below.

 And this is what it looks like when you are done. There is still a layer of paper on the front panel both to protect it and you also have to put paint in the engraved letters and logo on the front panel. So I will leave this paper on until the unit is completely done. After this you can disassemble the front panel again and continue work on the PCB. In the picture on the right you can see how the leds look when you are done. with the front panel still one.

And here is a picture with the front panel removed. As you can see all the leds are in the correct height now. You could never to this as well without using the trick with the front panel as described above. Next thing is doing some power tests without all the IC's installed. To do this you connect a stabilized external 12V adapter. And then measure the power with a multimeter on certain points of the base PCB. There are two voltages to check 5 Volts and 9 Volts.

Then you need to put the front panel PCB on top and check the voltages there as well. You can also regulate the brightness and contrast of the LCD in this stage using the small potmeters on the side of the base PCB. And there are also some jumpers you need to install depending on what type of display you use and also depending on which SID chips you are going to use. This SammichSID will use 6582 SID's and then you also need to install the right capacitors next to the SID's. They are on sockets so that you can exchange them if you need to. So far things look OK. All the power tests were OK. So I guess I'm ready to go on.