An Overengineered Power Supply Adapter for Old Casios
There are two important things about old Casios and the like:
- They are fun and sound cool
- They mostly don't run on standard guitar pedal power and often do not arrive from, like, Goodwill with power adapters
As such, a friend asked me what it would take to make a little power adapter so that they could plug any old guitar pedal power supply (e.g. Onespot) into a Casio and be very confident that nothing fries. In theory it doesn't take much. But of course it always ends up taking more than you expect.
I had a now-retired coworker who had "there are no simple changes" written on his white board for something like a decade. It's a nice thing to remember when I tell myself "oh I'll just throw a linear regulator in there and everything will work great, no problems, do it in one spin of hardware." At least for now, I rarely get away that easy.
I'm working on assembling six copies of my power board and, again, in theory it's simple and it should work, but for some reason it's not. Power comes up briefly and then shuts off. It's unclear why for now. I'll have to spend some time digging into my simple design.
Hardware design, like a lot of things, is a forever cycle of frustration and reward. Hopefully I get to the reward part before the end of the week so I can ship these boards out to my friend who is patiently waiting for them.