Time flies, it’s been one and a half year since I started this project and progress is slow. Though there is progress!
Battery change, service V8.3 upgrade
In March I discovered a battery leak in the PPG Wave 2 and decided to send that board to Virtual Music for repair. I also did the same with corresponding 2.2 board. Since the V8.3 firmware upgrade goes on the same board I sent the chips as well. Besides the battery change, the 2.2 also got a little service.
Today, nine months later, I decided to put the card back in the 2.2 and it started right up! Great success on that and I feel that the hardware is now serviced. Focus will now be on the racking process.
Rack measurement
A year ago I also purchased a rack chassis. I bought a 6U rack with the widest inner width I could find. The inner width is 434 mm and the outer width is 436 mm.
I’ve also done a lot of measurements of the PPG and rack, and right now I’m feeling very hopeful. There were two main obstacles, both having to do with the width.
The first one was the fact that the original LCD and the “button board” simply wouldn’t fit. With the newer LCD, that will not be a problem. The board is around 240 mm and the lcd is 182 mm. That means more than 10 mm margin.
The second one, and this still needs to be solved, is the 2.2 motherboard. The width is 435 mm which is 1 mm wider than the inner width. I see two ways of solving this:
- Use washers or some other kind of spacer on each side to move the side panels a few millimeter outwards. According to my measurements I could probably gain 6-8 mm by doing this
- Shave off the motherboards right edge – from what I can tell it’s probably possible to shave off around 2-4 mm of the motherboard. In a way, I feel this is kind of risky, but on the other hand the rack case will be properly assembled.
No matter what route I take, there’s one thing that also has to be modified. On the motherboard’s other edge, there are two pin headers that have a 90 degree angle. They need to be desoldered and straightened up, otherwise the connectors will hit the side panel. They can’t be bent when soldered to the board since they’re very thick.
I think the best thing to do next is to simply test fit the board in the case and actually see how many mm that are missing!