Hi I'm Chris and this is my new Pass Pen. Zen!!

[bart_dood]

Hi, I had the DIY bug for a long time and finally stumbled across passdiy a while ago, I have put a link to some shots of my pass diy penultimate zen amp, its mostly made from scrap that I salvaged from work, I had to buy the components to populate the boards and the (625VAC) mains transformer, the boards I made on a LPKF protomat; the whole project cost me $150 US dollars, please have a look at my photos and tell me what you think, all comments appreciated!

Chris


http://public.fotki.com/bartsimpson1...r_amp_project/

[roddyama]

Great job Chris,

Maybe you can post some pic of the finsihed insides.

BTW, how well are those pressed fin heatsinks working?

[Blues]

It far from the scrap you are telling us...nice work! Is that plexiglass on the front panel...I bet you're going to light it up with blue LED.

[bart_dood]

The heatsinks are I believe glued in with some kind of thermal epoxy, they are from a company that makes peltiers called "Melcor".
They are used in cooler modules that fit into some of the products my company makes, usually 4X 1.5" square peltiers are on this heatsink so I figured they would be a good size for the amp boards.
I took some temp. measurements after I built the amp, at the highest temp spots (near the mosfets) the temp gets to about 50C.
The neat thing about the case I made is that the bottom is 0.25" aluminium and the top is 0.0625" aluminium, so they actually conduct some of the heat away also.

Chris

P.S. I do not have any more pics of the inside of the amp, but next time I open it up to check on it I will post some more!

[Da5id4Vz]

Must be nice having a little CNC machine for building stuff. Did you slot the side panels for the heat sink fins on the same machine?

Looks great and I love your total materials cost.

-Dave

[bart_dood]

The mill I used for the boards is this one (I think):

http://www.lpkf.com/products/rapid_p...s/c_100_hf.htm

We bought it just for making prototype circuit boards etc, it is expensive at $20k but I didn't have to pay that!
I used the gerber files from the passdiy website, although we did have a lot of problems importing the drill holes, the LPKF system is very quirky and it takes quite a while to get used to it. I downloaded a copy of Eagle for PCB's and I made up two more boards for the pre-amp I am working on, I got the design from the ESP website, its going to be an op-amp battery powered design (lithium ion rechargeable) with integrated phono-amp stage. This was also very cheap to make at around $40 (ince $20 for an Alps blue volume pot).
The heatsinks were already made up, they were in some scrap products that I collected from our large garbage heap here at work, I just stripped them down and then drilled and tapped them for the mosfets etc.

Chris

[kevyjo]

I think it looks very classy indeed.

[Coulomb]

Does the blue bin full of parts appear in the finished version? Is this some new method of parts implementation? I must have missed that thread!

Very nice, Very nice.

Anthony

[Nelson Pass]

Indeed.....Very nice.

[Taco]

Very nice, my Aleph-X looks horrible compared to that (but I don't care, because I made it myself )