Senior Member
Joined: 13/08/2024
Location: NetherlandsPosts: 104
| Posted: 07:22am 17 Oct 2024 |
Mick,
Thank you for the offer to design a printed circuit board. From the many postings, I gather that you are an accomplished pcb designer. The pcbs you have made look beautiful. I could not match you. I am a practical person myself and usually use a Vero hole printed circuit board with some free wiring. In the meantime I have read up on the use of pcb software here because I also like it as a pastime, I am retired after all. Without thinking I would have taken KiCad but given the comments on the way of working within KiCad I am orienting myself towards other software. Also because in this case I do not want to work from a circuit design. I think Sprint Layout is a good alternative. 45 years ago I made an Eurokaart printed circuit board design for an IEEE mini-bus system with Meccanorma symbols and adhesive tape of 1, 2 and 3 mm and after that I did not design any more printed circuit boards until almost 3 years ago. Then I made an amplifier pcb in EasyEDA and I liked that. I saw afterwards that the price was very high for 2 pcb's and then I refrained from submitting the pcb order, €120 for 2 pcb I found much too expensive. I have to say that the prices at the moment are very "reasonable" for the numbers and dimensions. Of course it was a far from standard size. Nevertheless I find a "professional" solution for this Harman Kardon amplifier better, also because these types of amplifiers do well on the second hand market and if the adjustments are done properly you can set a good price. For now I first make a free wired design to test if I have thought of everything. In fact you only need 5 wires from the Pico to the amplifier, PON, Volume up, Volume down, GND and VSYS (5V). If I need your knowledge and skills I will certainly bother you.
Edit: corrected some typos and added amp photo.
It is a nice amp and it had some problems when I bought it. It was repaired by another repair guy but it had still the random remote issues and some problem with the bias current of one channel. The guy had "repaired" some bad soldering joints but introduced by that a shortage. Fortunately not a severe shortage but you could hear the distortion in one channel and the bias current was fixed at 0 mA. It took me 1 hour to disassemble the mainboard because of the many soldering connections and more time to find the tiny shortage. This amp is far from service friendly built but the sound is goooooood!
Edited 2024-10-17 18:35 by Marcel27