Power Supply

With the main case all ready to go I still needed to make something new to house the power supply since the old housing could not accomodate the extra supply for the VU-meter. Since I had already used quite a bit of money on the main casing and since the supply is not meant to be on display I decided to go cheap on it (well, also because I might build a Sigma11 for it sometime in the future and hence do not want to spend a whole lot of cash on a temporary solution).
What I came up with was a reuse of the old casing for the M3. Since its front and back plates were full of holes I cut some new steel plates to use instead. Since I did not have the patience for a proper multi-layer paint-job I found some "carbon-look" vinyl I had ordered some time ago and decided to try and make something passable for the front and back plates.

At the top is the old aluminum back plate, all full of useless holes, below it is the steel cutout for the new power supply front plate and at the bottom is the piece of vinly I decided to see if I could make something nice with.

Using a knife for cutting the vinyl to shape and a pen to cover the mistakes I inevitably made I finally got it in place.
When working vith vinyl, heating it up a bit makes it much easier to work with. A heatgun is fine, but a hairdryer will do just fine!

This is the end result, you might have guessed that the round hole is for the on/off-button, but the square one should have teased your curiosity by now... I got some very cheap digital voltmeters on eBay and thought that I might as well put one on the front so that I can monitor the supply voltage at any time. I guess that the task of monitoring the supply voltage might be so involving that I will forget to listen to music at times...

This is the initial fitting of the power button and the voltmeter. It seemed OK to me, so I chose to proceed. Anyways, carbon seems to be all the rage these days, so the fake carbon front will most definitely have a placebo-effect and make the unit perform better.
The rest was just tedious labor and internal wiring, so without further ado, I will show you a few pictures of the internals below.



All that was left now was to quickly make a power cable. I chose to use low-gauge wire with cable sleeving made of blue reflective paracord.
Finally everything was ready so I hooked everything up... and there was music...