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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There may be situations where you don’t want to plugin a FAB module directly to another FAB module. Some situations I can think of is If you want to position the additional module somewhere else (trying to fit in a chassis). Or you may want to make a U-turn so the XLR Output Module is facing the same direction as the XLR Input Module. Or maybe, your signal chain is getting too long and you want to break it up so it will  be easier to work with.

You can solve all these issues by using an ordinary 10-pin male-to-male IDC cable to hook up the different FAB Modules together.

The normal FAB Module uses Female Headers for the Inputs. So for us to be able to use an ordinary male-to-male flexible IDC cable, we also need Male Headers in front of the FAB Module. Here comes the FAB9001 Cable to FAB Adapter to the rescue.

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