Lair Synth!

And now for all those crossover fans of Sword and Sorcery, home brew Roleplaying games, and DIY synths (getting into pretty deep subsets of subsets here), the first board for the Lair synth.

It's primarily a guitar synth and effects processor but will have a few inputs for Control Voltage.

The first board above is for the two Low Frequency Oscillators that will be used to shape the effects.

I've never been a fan of etching circuit boards myself so I usually use something similar to this system.

It's a sheet of thin craft balsa plywood. I create the circuit layout in a program called Fritzing and print off the PCB layout on sticky label stock. You can use a punch to make the holes for the components and you're ready to go, just solder it all together. 

The yellow traces I run with jumpers on the bottom and the blue ones are jumpers I run on the top.

This keeps my wires from crossing over each other too much and the program allows me to layout my parts to avoid jumpers as much as possible.

This board here is probably 4x5 inches and the case has room for plenty of those.

And here's the case.

It's an old antec computer case. Aluminum construction makes it strong and light. It also has that great plexiglass side. Originally it was one of those cool cases with all the strobing led's and stuff. Now it'll serve as a great faceplate for all the knobs and switches. Plastic is way easier to drill than metal, and grounding all the pots is way easier for me than having to drill all the holes in metal.

That crazy looking board is the power supply that I built for the last synth. As you can see the boards were much bigger then. I usually laid out my schematic on an 11x17 board in the same way as the LFO board above.  Lot's of room to work with and trace circuits but...inconvenient for everything else. 

I'll keep posting progress as it comes along and let you know when I throw it all at the wall as a dismal failure.

~Ripley