[aeriyn]

This is the smallest Hammond extruded aluminum available, and I thought I could get a 9V battery in there on its side. But I was wrong, so very wrong! The amp board cannot possibly be made any smaller, but perhaps I can get a smaller bodied power switch.

I wonder if I can cram 6x AAAs in the case, ala SuperMacro... still gonna need a tinier switch though.

Suggestions perhaps?

 

[Syzygies]

It will only fit that way by a combination of drastic measures.

Are you willing to file away a bit of the inside of this end of the case?

Slim down your snap connector, e.g. for RadioShack "better" quality snap off its cover and replace with vinyl electrical tape or paint on a permanent insulator. Then you'll need to devise a way to keep this cover on without the screws, whose heads you could glue into place if you care about cosmetics and think this helps.

 

[Fangmasterflex]

You'll go crazy trying to fit a 9v in there sideways, heh believe me i know. You could always redesign the board into an L shape if youre willing to

 

[en480c4]

A friend of mine wanted to do the same thing, and decided to split his board to an "L" shape. Unfortunately he ran into a lot of issues trying to fit it in the case, including some grounding issues. I guess height was his problem. There wasn't enough room to fit everything, or so he said. He gave up and re-cased it in an Altoids tin.

Sorry, I know it's not the help you were looking for, but here are a few pics of his efforts:

And how it ended up:

If you do go that route, good luck...

 

[Fangmasterflex]

I pretty much built a similar design to your friends cmoy, but i didn't have a height problem even with 470uf capacitors. I did however have a problem with the board hitting the input switch and not being able to close the hammond, so i just drilled a hole on its side and put the input switch there. Unfortuantly i dont have pictures of the internals of my cmoy but you can have a look at the outside here This case is sure a pain, but its just so sexy

 

[sbelyo]

I've seen someone on ebay use that case and fit a cmoy in it with 1 9VB. There were 2 significant things. He used soic (much smaller) versions of the op amps instead of dip and he had a pcb made in the shape of an L.

 

[n_maher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by en480c4 A friend of mine wanted to do the same thing,

Hey, look at that, it's my amp!

My issues with the tiny hammond could best be summed up by the following statement: there is such a thing as too small. The jumper wires that I had run on the bottom side of the board made the fit at the end of the case waaaaaaay to tight and was causing a ground short when the amp was in the case. That said, the L-shaped design that I came up with could have been made to work but it would have meant tearing it all apart and rebuilding the power supply which I just wasn't willing to do at that time. If you look at the pics of how I did the PS you could easily make that section of proto smaller by cutting off the outer two rows of holes (on each side) which would leave you a lot more room for the switch and LED on the back panel. My biggest design concern was really that the wiring for the switch and LED was going to get tweaked every time you had to change a battery. So I gave up, threw it in a altoids tin knowing that I had bigger and better amp plans so the learning was valuable but the amp was not.

I can see how using a MINT board (from tangent) you could do a lot better in terms of space managment and if I'd been willing to have components come out the side of the case I certainly could have made it work. But for me it was mostly an issue of knowing that the MINT that I wanted to build was going to look like this (finished the second one this weekend):

Someday I might get around to using that little hammond but for now I've got the portable amp that I want. Running a single 9v in the little guy would have yielded pretty crappy life running the buffers nearly wide open (220 R11) and biased into class A (which is what my modded MINT does).

If you want any more help with the L-moy just shoot me a PM, I'm happy to offer what limited knowledge I do have.

Nate

 

[Pars]

You could try using the Alps RK09 with the built-in switch and board mount it, which would cut down on everything other than the jacks, battery and the LED. GainHead is selling these (he has an ad over on headwize in their marketplace for around $6 or so a pop; he is also a member here). These have standard 0.100" mounting (six pins for the pot, laid out in 3x2 std. like and RK27, then another 2 pins space back a bit).

I've been playing with Guzzler's Eagle file for a home etched pcb (CMoy), but changed it into an A47, and was thinking of doing something like this instead of using the Panasonic pot.

good luck,

Chris

 

[Syzygies]

Take a look at The Super Mini Moy.

There's an inevitability to the design, if one tries this: Use PC mount 1/8" jacks and pot, and toggle switch, to avoid a rat's nest of wires inside. Use an L-shaped circuit board, with the power supply section next to the battery. 8x15mm caps fit easily, with the board sliding into the bottom slot, that's plenty of capacitance for a CMoy.

He isn't showing his board for this amp, but elsewhere on his site one can see clearly that he orders commercial boards. Ordering precut end panels, this baby probably assembles in minutes.

 

[Pappucho]

The trick to getting everything to fit is using the L-shape board and laying the caps on their sides. This allows you to put in up to 1000uF caps such as the ones I am using here (even higher capacitance if you use Panasonic FC's). I started out trying to get a Cmoy into Hammond's smallest case, the 1455C8 and am now able to get a modified PPA design (3XAD8610's and 4XBUF634'S) in the same case using SMD components. Here's a pic of a buffered cmoy (aka mint) amp in Hammond's smallest extruded aluminum case.....

 

[Earwax]

Quote:

Originally Posted by n_maher

That turned out really well!

What size Hammond is that?

 

[gsferrari]

Try using one of these :-

 

[skyskraper]

i used tangents microcmoy layout to fit a cmoy and 9v battery in the smallest hammond case. try building that one

 

[aeriyn]

Quote:

Originally Posted by skyskraper i used tangents microcmoy layout to fit a cmoy and 9v battery in the smallest hammond case. try building that one

This is what I ended up doing.

 

[n_maher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Earwax That turned out really well! What size Hammond is that?

Hey, thanks for the compliment! It's the Hammond 1455J1201BK. The case is just a little bit bigger than my Ipod (which is in a case) on all sides so it makes a nice platform for it. I'll have a silver one done before the end of the weekend that should be fun to compare it with. And I'll be taking some more pictures of both of them to put in a separate thread.

Nate