MIDIbox of the Week (MBSID of seppoman)

[TK.]

We all remember the legendary "Der Brat 1000" (-> http://69.56.171.55/~midibox/forum/index.php?topic=3651.0)

This is the small version "Der Brat. 50" - the ideal mobile solution for jamming together with friends ;-)

Seppoman wrote:

Here´s the new MB SID I built: A little brother for the "Der Brat. tausend.", called "Der Brat. 50". Main goal was to keep the box as portable and cheap as possible, so I built it into the case of an old C64 floppy, used only the Step A surface with an old 2x16 LCD I had left over and even didn´t use premade PCBs.

You can see I built everything (Core, SID, DIN_X1 and BankStick) onto one vector board. The power switch is the old one of the floppy drive. The access LED of the drive is used as Midi In LED :) . The metallic blue paint was very time-consuming - I had to sand it down and start over several times because of too much dust, too much paint, touched the thing too early etc... So I needed two cans of blue and 1.5 of clear paint. Without this waisted paint the total cost (not counting the display) would´ve been around 40 Euros.

[srmaietta]

Great job Seppoman..  great case idea, grat paint job, great PCB/protoboard work.  Heavy duty soldering!! : )    I like the stencil, and the knob/button choices go very well with the overall look of the device..  Theres actually alot of room inside, it looks like you could put two or three SID in there! (or half of a control surface!

way to go!  I hope to post pics of my MBsid on the forum someday..

cheers

~Steve

[bosone]

the case is absolutely fantastic!!!!! :-)

great work

[seppoman]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your comments :)

Theres actually alot of room inside, it looks like you could put two or three SID in there! (or half of a control surface!

Actually there´s not so much room inside for additions - above the board there´s only about 15 mm of "usable air" and below the display about the same. The case is just 4 cm high, way smaller than a 1541 floppy. If there would be a board below any CS items, everything would get very crowded inside.

A second SID is not needed for live performance in my opinion, and the CS can´t ever be the full version on this size, so this box is not for creating sounds via CS but only for using them anyway. I briefly thought about at least adding the filter section of the CS, but the encoders/buttons/LEDs would need another DIN_X1 and need to be placed on the free front portion of the case. But a good workaround for live use is to route the filter cutoff to the MOD-wheel of the keyboard. I also wanted to preserve a bit of the floppy disk look, and a disk drive with 30 crowded knobs standing out of the top would just not look nice. I´m a friend of clear simple designs, as you can also see on the Brat 1000 :)

Anyway, the "Brat. 3000" is still in the queue, It will have a similar surface as the 1000, but with 4 SIDs, a huge VFD display, and I´m thinking of adding a Boss SE-50 effects unit and perhaps a simple 4 channel mixer, so this will be the luxury version the 50 doesn´t need to be :)

I´m just sending Thorsten a mail with fotos of a very special MB64 and a MidiMon, so more pictures to come :)

Seppoman

[Jurbo]

A nice, simple design. I only hope that the OC118N drive was already beyond repair... I had one of those as a kid, nowadays I have a 1541-II...  :)

How the hell did you have the patience to make the vector board??? Nice integration of the circuits there!  ;)

[seppoman]

Hi Jurbo,

I only hope that the OC118N drive was already beyond repair... I had one of those as a kid, nowadays I have a 1541-II...  :)

I didn´t really find out. I once eBayed a huge package with 2 C64s, 4 floppies and a lot of half-broken joysticks and one broken dot matrix printer. The mail man breathed very hard ;) Two drives were ok, one broken, and this one had no power supply. I tried it with a 1541-II PSU because it had the same connector and it didn´t work. But I don´t know if the Commodore PSU is suitable. Anyway, I think this way it´s soul will live on :)

How the hell did you have the patience to make the vector board??? Nice integration of the circuits there!  ;)

Thanks - it gave me quite a headache to get all the connections right, two very long nights of soldering and thinking. But I think it´s also quite rewarding to do this by hand one time, because you can more physically learn to understand how everything is interconnected and how it works. But I won´t do this again, one time is enough ;)

Seppoman