Well, thankfully John saved my a** by managing to repair the prototype board we blew last week. We're still not taking orders, but here is a photo of the most recent prototype that we have been playing with. This is 90% of the way to what the final will look like, save for some changes to the positioning of the various ports and slots. The panel is 6" square. The light at the front is the charging light. When on, unit is charging, when off, battery is fully charged. The switches are on/charge, USB/SPDIF coax/TOSLINK, and filter selection (that on the chip or John's awesome sounding software filter). The little slot behind that is where the optional sample rate display goes. That's a heat sink for the charging circuit at the left center, The screw heads in the middle hold the battery under the chassis, and I think the rest of the stuff is pretty self explanatory. Some of this may shift around and there will be one more slot for "accessories" to be determined in the future - that's why I say it's 90% like the finished version.
Good news is that it sounds quite good even with the charging circuit active. Great news is it sounds fabulous running off battery only. We are exploring the notion of a standby mode that keeps the board on and warmed up while the battery trickle charges, for those who like to keep their SS gear on all the time, and possibly a fast charge mode for those who are impatient and don't mind replacing the SLA battery more often.
