The Little Board was designed so that it could be mounted to a 5.25″ floppy disk drive. In keeping with this vibe, it uses a floppy disk drive power connector with just 12V and 5V; -12V for RS232 is generated on the board itself.
With this in mind, i thought that perhaps a disk drive enclosure could be a useful starting point. I had bought a hard disk in an external enclosure at a swap meet, but i was unable to find any information on the interface. I figured that the drive within would not be reliable in any case.
The enclosure has a heavy linear supply providing +5V and +12V. The drive itself is a full height 5.25″ drive, so there is sufficient accommodation for two half height floppy disk drives.
I figured that i could sequester unused parts, including the hard disk, just in case i wanted to return it to its original state.
I wanted to include a physical floppy disk drive, a gotek emulator, the Little Board, and a SCSI2SD card. If i mounted the Little Card to the floppy drive then it would have been underneath which would make it difficult to access the connectors.
Instead, i created a “baseplate” to accommodate the Little Board and the SCSI2SD. I mounted the baseplate on the top cover.
I replaced the perspex front panel with a new aluminium panel with a cutout for the drives and holes for power and hard disk lights and a reset switch.
Both the front panel and the baseplate were earthed. I used metal standoffs and cleared paint so that they would ground the cards.
The front panel got a couple of coats of gloss Bermuda blue.
The enclosure had a couple of cutouts for connectors, which gave enough space for two 9 pin serial ports and the 25 pin printer port. I made up a custom panel to overlay the existing cutouts.
