I actually did build my 80's era modular into Vector CCA 19" Card Cages. Three cages in fact. Each card was a fiberglass perfboard with a 44-pin double sided connector. It was all hand wired, no printed circuits. I had developed a method of building electronics on non-plated perfboard by simply soldering together the leads of components on the back side. All ICs were in sockets. All connections to the circuit went through the backplane connector. I used a non-regulated dual supply with on-card regulation. The panel was a single piece of aluminum. All knobs, LEDs and switches were on the left side. An unlabelled (but grouped by module) patch bay of minijacks adorned the right side. The cages stacked up, so all patching was on the right side. The hard part was wiring the backplane connectors making a huge cable harness to everything on the front. I used military grade Teflon insulated #24 wire. There was probably a lot of cross-talk. I sold this synth and years later got a call from the buyer asking if I had the patch bay documentation! I did not. Somehow it had all been lost, including the schematics.
BTW, notice my new email address. I moved to a new house three miles from the old one, and had to switch DSL providers. Sadly, my MOTM is still boxed up and will be for some time.
-Richard Brewster
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Halliday <
dh@...>
Sent: Mar 10, 2005 9:57 PM
To:
motm@yahoogroups.comSubject: RE: [motm] Reconfigurable Modular
You are looking at something called a Card Cage. Vector makes them but
they are _very_ pricey .
Without the backplane (this means you provide your own edge connectors
and mechanical support -- they provide the sheet-metal for mounting
_their_ plugins, a 19" wide by 3U tall unit is $227
These are frequently available on the surplus market though. When I was
starting out in synthesys (building Electronotes circuits), I was able
to get a bunch of them from a computer mainframe manufacturer that went
belly up and they worked out well. (The company made peripherals for DEC
equipment. I was living in Boston at the time)
Vector
http://www.vectorelect.com/Product/Subracks/CCK13-Series.htm Newark -- Vector cardcage without backplane and plugins
http://www.newark.com/NewarkWebCommerce/newark/en_US/endecaSearch/searchPage2.jsp?x=0
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=gensearch>
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