Introducing the Sbox12 automatic wiring box for etracer. The Sbox12 is designed to sit underneath the etracer Model-01 chassis and performs automatic wiring for the users.

The heart of the Sbox12 is a 7-by-12 (A total of 84 relays) switching matrix that routes the 6 source pins (HV1, HV2, GND, NEGV, HTR2 and HTR1) from the etracer PCB to up to 12 destination pins that connect to vacuum tubes sockets. Each of the 12 destination pins can connect to any of the 6 source pins plus a no-connection option independently. With the control of the etracer PC software the switching matrix inside the Sbox12 is routed whenever a vacuum tube configuration file is loaded into the PC memory by the application software. Hence the effort of manual wiring to adapt to different pin configurations is no longer needed.

The Sbox12 PCB

Note: The reason for a 7-by-12 matrix instead of a 6-by-12 matrix is the added possibility to connect the NEGV pin from etracer to different out pins with or without a resistor in series. This option is for future implementation of the software.

The Sbox12 PCB integrates an USB hub IC in it hence only one USB cable is needed to connect to a PC from the etracer/Sbox12 combo.