Universal-Front-Plate

The Universal front plate was a project that I had high hopes for and while it did not accomplish what I originally set out to do with it I still found it quite useful. Basically the board has 16 of the same footprint which can fit either an erthenvar style 3.5" jack, a board mount alpha pot or a sideways SPDT toggle switch. There is also a set of 8 LEDs and their dedicated current limiting resistors going down the middle and hooked up to a trimmer which controls the overall brightness. All of these components are wired to some headers going along each side of the board so that a component board can be attached. My idea was that this project would allow people to breadboard their own ideas while having a simple board which could handle various panel configurations and also maybe have some panels with drill positions marked to make prototyping without panel wiring much quicker. The problem became that components were crammed too close together: when pots are placed in adjacent positions, whether vertically or horizonally, knob tightness became a serious issue. I could not use the space saving "plastic shaft" pots because the pots are oriented sideways and so the direction marker would be rotated by 90 degrees. Even placing the pots diagonally posed some issues with spacing. However I did make two designs with the UFP and I have a few more coming up, as well as possibly other version of the UFP which are less universal but which are more efficient in their use of space.