Hm, so after 6 years of development you saw an empty case? I'm sorry that I don't jump up and down excitedly because of that.
Besides, because of new positions for valves, as I hear, even that empty case will not be final, right?
And no one with a functional camera in the whole city of Munich, what a shame.
The chassis mechanicals are final (a few tweaks to tighten tolerances) - the unit is being built for the software house to start the Ui development - its NOT just an empty case - it now has a functional front panel / digital section to allow software development.
Have an SLR somewhere but would need to be charged, I just dont have the time to mess about searching... waiting instead for replacement camera / battery to arrive for the iPhones... I'd expect parts to arrive this week...
BTW. components arrived today for the development boards so will build them up this week.
The software house first job is to split the Rpi framebuffer to allow independent displays for the internal front panel / external HDMI displays, a good year ago I contacted Rpi asking for there help to work on the drivers...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=108&t=120541&p=1254121#p1254121
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=216399
Once we have the frame buffer split then we need to import a memory "light" browser as we currently use Chrome which is very resource heavy, and we don't have the free RAM to run two browsers (one for the internal display, one for the external display). Volumio has its own OS build with many dependencies stripped out (some missing dependencies are required for the light browser) - we also will have to update Volumio to the latest Linux OS (I'm not sure of the names here "Buster" or some such) - just listening to the software guys discussing the project development path.
Once this is completed then we can work on the actual UI design - I decided on HTML based (rather then QT) as it then allows anyone with Web design experience to customize the UI / functionality of the DAC. The Control APi command set that communicates with the MDAC2 hardware will be published to make this possible.
While this is going on, I'm continuing the design of the Analogue PCB - when he works on this project, Jarek's working on the digital + Modulator boards & 3D modeling (to insure its all going to fit in such a small package - we recently discovered a clearance issue between the Tubes on the lower PCB and the above mounted Modulator PCB that requires alittle bit of a sideways slip-in and "wiggling" to install).
I cannot stress more that I'm very heavily invested in completing the MDAC2 ASAP.