It’s been a long time since the last post and a lot has happened over the summer. The North Lab has moved into a new and better location with real windows! NSE labs also obtained our first custom printed circuit board – the power supply board for the B-17B bass preamplifier. Below you can see a picture of the board and an action photo of the South Lab CEO assembling it (he visited the North Lab for the construction phase, so you can also see the new workbench in the photo). Best thing was – it worked!
And here is the completed power supply board:
Obviously this is not an extremely complex board. The objective was to prove out the process of designing and manufacturing a custom printed circuit board, and that objective was accomplished.
The next step in this project will be to design a printed circuit board for the rest of the B-17B preamp. And then a power amplifier. And to that end the South Lab CEO came through again with a very inexpensive Class-D amplifier kit. So far we have built two of these and they work very well – up to 30W bridged output without the need for a heatsink. Nice for testing all kinds of things.
Then things got a little sidetracked. After all these years I finally decided to take the amateur radio technician class license exam and obtained my ticket in July. Then the FCC was kind enough to grant my request for a special call sign – K9NSE. So NSE labs is on the air! More details on that adventure can be found at this link.
We’ve also started into another project, this one again coming from the South Lab. It is a mid-side processing circuit. More details on that in a future post – and hopefully it won’t take so long to get that next post out.