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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I’ve been testing the DC-1248 (12Volts to 48Volts Phantom Power) the past few days now, and I was able to further improve performance by reducing ripple down to 128mV, for a 47.7Volts output, fully loaded drawing at 57mA.  Efficiency is computed to be at 76% at this loading.

I reduced the ripple by adding another 0.1uf ceramic and 47uf electrolytic capacitor to the DC-1248 output terminals.  Since there is no more space on the DC-1248 board (measuring only 1″x1″), I added these parts to our FAB1215 PSU Module.  So here’s the new Rev.B design.

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Our next board up for prorotyping is our FAB1215 Module. This is a Power Supply Module, which accepts a 12V DC input, and provides a +15V, -15V, and +48V output voltages to power your project.

The +15V and -15V will be provided by a DC-DC converter, which can provide up to 190mA per voltage rail.  The 48Volts will be provided by a FiveFish Audio DC-1248 module (12V to 48V) which can provide up to 30mA (UPDATE: Received the DC-1248 prototype boards and testing shows) 60mA maximum @ 48Volts.

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