DIY standards II

[Harry Bissell]

Harry Bissell writes: "voluntary" standards. 

JH. I'm quite comfortable with vectorboard and push-pin terminals. Half of my modular was built that way. The drawback is that it is precisely what you mentiioned "one-off". It takes as much time to build a second one as the first. And for a "newbie" its out of the question.

I considered using a standard single-sided copper "proto-board" from some company like "Mouser" or "MCM" or even once upon a time "Radio (gag) Shcak". With common Bus connections and "three per pad" they let you do a pretty good job. But documentation takes longer than it takes for me to layout a PCB. (I'm quick...) And again, a newbie can't follow easily. Both point to point and "semi" point to point are hard to troubleshoot unless you have a lot of practice.

I have no commercial aspirations... but if I get a schematic from a list member (or one of mine) I can knock out a board at lunchtime or after hours at work, with no qurstions of "what project is that" and I can't do that with veroboard. Likewise, at home its easier to jump on the computer than get into a soldering project. 

What I'm suggesting is that the DIYers don't spin their wheels. Some of us excell at design, some debug, some at documentation and archiving, and some just at moral support and asking questions that stimulate research. "Standards" should be rejected the moment thay stifle the creative engines. But I'll make up some PCB's (designs and maybe even order some...)if people are interested. I just want to know how peol;pe like to mount them. (parallel to the panel, perpendicular to the panel, 3x5, 1.75"x 17.25" etc.)

Keep those cards and letters comming folks. When the thread ends I'll write a summary of the comments.   :-) harry

jh <jhaible at primus-online.de> wrote:
Bureaucracy is the end of all creativity ...
Standards can be as well. I've seen the pro's and con's of introducing
standards in a big company, and I feel that sometimes the pro's outweight
the con's, but not *that* much. But standards for a distributed community of
DIY builders ? No way.
I don't even have a standard for my own stuff I've built over the years.
I set myseld standards for a limited peroid, like building that JH-3 synth,
or building 19" modules. Just to find that little table top boxes or
stomp boxes can have their benefits, too, and that I wanted a whole
new synth with a patch matrix rather than 1/4" jacks. Or the JH-4:
Intended to hold 4 modules at the width of a 5 octave keyboard.
What now ? Just one module finished. Thought about building a
MS-20 clone to fit into that standard. Better than 19" at least.

As for PCB layout - it was this list which convinced me to give up
making layouts. And I had a quite advanced technique to design
very dense single sided layouts, as the people who got the JH-4
filter stuff might have seen. But what is it good for one-offs ?
Yes, it's good for sharing the designs, but then it takes a lot of
time to create it,and I might be able to share 5 designs without
pcbs in the same time. What would you prefer ?
I highly recommend using veroboards, and mounting the components
as you would on a printed board, i.e. no bunch of loose wires, but
make the connections at the bottom as if it were copper tracks.
Takes a little longer than a "wild" veroboard, but much faster than
making a pcb layout.

If you have fun making good layouts, it's a good thing of course.
I recently was given a pcb from Jörgen that was a pleasure
to look at, densely populated to get max functions on minimum 
space. Very nice. 

But what good would it be to make a pcb
layout that is much larger that one could build on a veroboard ?
With nothing more than straight copper connections between 
components that are loosely spread across a large board ?

What I mean is if you have making multiple modules in mind
(like Gene's famous ASM), or even something commercial,
go for an optimized layout (and forget about anybody's standards).
But if you only build for yourself and share the design, don't
waste your energy and time.

JH.


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