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48Volt DC Converter plugin to our FAB1215 Module

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FAB1000 Power Modules
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Here’s a photo of our FAB1215 Power Supply Module, outfitted with our DC-1248 (+48V converter module).

I finally got the chance to test the 48V power supply by hooking up our FAB2010 XLR Input Module, FAB2110 Input Transformer Module, and FAB3010 XLR Output Module, using them as a pass-through before going into an API 512C preamp.   But instead of turning on Phantom Power on the API preamp, I used the 48V source on our FAB module.

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FAB1215 Power Supply Module Prototype – Working!

Yesterday, we got the boards back from the PCB fab house. Today, I built the FAB1215 prototype and tested it.  Now, we have a power supply to power all our FAB modules. Yay!

This convenient power supply is powered by a simple 12VDC power adapter (wall wart). The one I’m using is rated 400mA and it’s the only one I can scrounge around… but I’d recommend a 1Amp power adapter so you have plenty of power to spare.

The +/-15Volts is generated by an off-the-shelf part, and the +48Volts for phantom power is generated by our DC-1248 Module (12VDC to 48VDC converter).

The FAB1215 has (1) DC jack to accept the 12Volts input, and (2) IDC headers that route +/-15Volts, and +48Volts so you can power (2) channels of your project.  The +/-15V is rated up to 190mA, and the 48Volts is rated up to 60mA  (this 60mA figure may change once I finalized on the component values and complete testing).  You simply hookup power using 10-pin ribbon cables to your FABs. It’s that easy.

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3D Gerber Viewer

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Random Stuff
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One of the FAB boards I submitted looked great on Eagle screen.  But when I got my “real” boards back, I see that silkscreen text was too large, and overlapped on some of the components.  What happened?

It seems I forgot to change the text type to “vector” from “proportional”. So it looked great and fits in the space alloted when viewing my board in Eagle. If I had viewed my gerber files, I would have discovered the problem.

So began the quest to find a Gerber Viewer for OSX… which I discovered was difficult. I spent too much time chasing dead end leads. Of course, #1 priority was the price….. FREE.

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