[sdiy] Today's Pet Peeve

[rsdio at audiobanshee.com]

That wouldn’t work at all.

If they all “standardized” on a single thickness, then it wouldn’t work in every situation.

Vertical mount 1/4” jacks with PCB solder pins would be huge compared to surface mount pots or tact buttons. There’s no way to build a skiff if every vertical mount component has to be standardized to match vertical 1/4” jacks. I’m just thinking of audio components. There are surely non-audio components that need to be different depths, so there’s no way to make everything match.

Sure, you could suggest that we ignore 1/4” vertical mount jacks, and require that everything else have a standard depth. But as soon as you make one exception, there are bound to be additional exceptions. The modular synth world is not the only game in the electronics industry.

Besides, what do you do with a component that’s only a fifth of the size of another component? Do you make every manufacturer pay for the extra material to fill in the unused gap? Do you make all customers deal with heavier products - an important consideration in today’s portable market - just so everything is a standard size?

The pros just fabricate plastic spacers that are custom designed for each product. I’ve seen countless home stereo components with a several-inch-long plastic extender from the power button on the front to the supply section of the PCB near the back. Some companies just put the power button on the back, but others want to be user friendly.

Doepfer avoid this issue by designing around right-angle mounted components so that depth isn’t an issue at all (just horizontal alignment). At least the older Doepfer modules are almost exclusively right-angle mounts (or panel mounts with hand-soldered wiring). Yes, the modern trend is parallel PCBs and vertical mount components, but I avoid that whenever possible just for sanity.

Brian

p.s. I just built a module with three panel mount components plus a button and display that have to line up with the panel. Of the three components, there were two different heights, so I needed parallel PCBs - one for the shallower components, and another for the deeper components. The distance between my PCBs was determined by the difference in height between the compoments. The board-to-board connectors are available in many different heights, but my PCBs were too close for any of them. I ended up needing the header pins to go through one side of a PCB to a connector on the far side that could handle pins passing all the way through one side and out the other.


On Jul 22, 2018, at 6:33 PM, David G Dixon <dixon at mail.ubc.ca> wrote:
> My "current" pet peeve is that almost every single component made to go between parallel panels and PCBs is a different height, requiring shimming washers or some other crap.  Why couldn't they all have gotten together and said "let's make 'em all 8 mm thick" or whatever?  I hate the electronic components industry with a seething passion.  I can't think of any other industry that abuses its customers so consistently and so casually.