Midibox SID V1

Having grown up on the 8-bit era, building a Midibox SID designed by Thorsten Klose (visit his site here) was a rather obvious choice for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t take much build photos so I’m left with presenting the completed device..:

 

Whereas most of the people on the UCapps forum seem to be building these inside C64 cases, I chose to go for as compact a casing as I could come across for free. Eventually I ended up with a rather study metallic one that used to be a network distribution box of a access control system. The casing is 1mm thick steel thus making the window-hole for the LCD took quite a bit of work as I only have a drill and a coarse file. I didn’t bother doing that good of a finishing sanding on the casing either, so there are some very visible filing scratches on the surface. The LCD window is cut from a DIL chip storage tube and attached with silicone.  To make the box look a bit more attractive (professional?), I printed some labels on the casing. Especially the crap looking seam of the LCD window was much improved by this small splash of “design” :)

Not much tweaks on the electronics front really, I added a heatsink to the SID chip and flipped the 7805 regulator to the lower side of the PCB. This way, I was able to use the bottom part of the casing as a heatsink. Cheap and effective.