Elektron Musical Instruments

On Sat, 11 Dec 1999, Aaron J. Grier wrote:

> I know that the sid chip is +5V, so I'm guessing that the +6V is run
> through a power regulator to get +5V.  That's not very much margin for
> power supply ripple -- I'll check out my crappy rat shack power supply
> with an oscilloscope on Monday.

Correct. The 6v is regulated to 5v. This is done with a
power-ultra-low-dropout power regulator with a lower regulating dropout
than most other such devices. Don't know why I picked it, but it looked
cool! :)

This also means that there is less heat emision from the SidStation than
would be otherwise.

> My question to the sidstation engineers: can I feed the sidstation a
> higher voltage and not kill it?  (like 9 or 12V?  Also why didn't you
> put in a diode to protect from reverse polarity power supplies?) 

There is protection for reverse power. You can feed it whatever voltage
you want. The regulator keeps the output at 5v. What happens is this:
The SidStation needs appr. 200mA static on 5v. Feeding it 10v means that
as much heat that is generated in the SidStation in whole will be
generated in the power regulator. Will probably be OK, but we haven't
tried it for extended time.

> And why oh why did you have to use those damn torx nuts for the case?
> :)

I passed it over to Torx-master Mikael. He thinks they look much cooler,
and therefore wanted to use them on the outside! :)

   __
__///Daniel Hansson           |   SidStation - MOS6581 Synthesis
\XX/ daniel@...   |         www.sidstation.com