Here are some wonky photos of the Roland System 700 clone VCA boards that arrived yesterday. The layout was ordered through iTeadStudio on Sunday 4th January and verified as ready for building the same day. I got a message to say they’d been dispatched on Friday 9th, and received them on Monday 19th, so it took just over two weeks. It’s a bit of a drag but I could’ve paid for the expensive postage if I’d wanted them quicker.

Check the comically thick traces round the back:

Compare with the SH-2 VCO board:

…I probably went a bit over-the-top with the trace thickness, but hopefully it’ll be ok.

I’ve stuffed most of one of the boards already, including the rare-ish 2SA493 and 2SC1000 transistors, I just need to order a couple of things I’m missing. Thankfully all the holes seem big enough, and despite the outrageous size of some of the pads it hasn’t made it particularly difficult to solder it. I’m pretty impressed with iTeadStudio so far.

With the parts in place, it’s easy to see it’s definitely quite a, um, relaxed layout – certainly compared to that 808 bass drum I did a while back. The boards are wayyyy bigger than typical Eurorack things – this is one of the smaller boards and it’s just under 15cm x 10cm (so no Euro version, soz). With a different layout this could be made an awful lot smaller, but I was keen just to stick to the original.