Saturday, October 1, 2011

Modified Wiring on Aurora Flatfield

I purchased a Gerd Neumann Aurora Flatfield Panel on-line. The quality of the panel itself was very nice as is the resulting illumination but the mechanical aspect of the wires connecting it to the inverter block are very flimsy.   I figured this would last only a little while before I broke the wires so I decided to improve it.

The first change I made was to encase the inverter in a custom plastic box.  I exposed the 12V input to the inverter with an RCA jack, just like those used on my dew heater controller.  I modified a 12V AC adapter with an RCA plug.  For the AC signal to the Aurora panel, I used a panel jack for a 1/4" phono plug.    This removes all of the stress on the thin wires going into the inverter box.


On the panel itself, I carefully drilled a hole through both the front translucent panel and the back opaque panel.  It is really easy to crack these by accident but not a disaster if that does happen.  I mounted another 1/4" phone jack through this hole and wired it to the original wires going to the electroluminescent sheet sandwiched between the two panels.


The panel can then be connected to the inverter with a simple cable with phone jacks on each end.  Only caution is that, when energized, the exposed wires in the previous picture will give an electric burn if touched.