The RockBoard MOD 1 V2 is an “All-in-One TRS & XLR, IEC & Barrel Patchbay” that gets mounted to a compatible RockBoard guitar pedalboard, centralising the I/O needed to connect the pedalboard to a sound system.

Ideally I’d like to be able to use this patchbay to also route a microphone into the audio interface that lives on my pedalboard, so I can adjust and tune my mic channel strip before it gets sent off to FoH, where the skill and experience of the mix engineer may be questionable…

Unfortunately, the MOD 1 has the XLR sockets set the incorrect direction for my use case. Generally you’d use the MOD 1 to connect an XLR out into the sound system, rather than an XLR feed from a mic to the pedalboard - however I have an external DI box (stereo, too) that handles that use case. It would be nice if we could reverse the XLR socket directions…

Reversing the XLR socket directions

Teardown

We begin by removing all of the screws in order to remove the metal housing from the PCB.

We’re then left with the PCB on its own, where you can see that the PCB has circuit traces to directly connect the respective pin paths of the connectors.

Looking closely at the XLR socket regions, we note that the male XLR and female XLR sockets have plastic pins in different locations (as is their mounting holes on the PCB). This means that we’ll have to either cut off the plastic pins (which isn’t a good idea in terms of stability); or to drill holes into the PCB.

Reversing

After drilling the holes, we need to think about how to reconnect the pins, as the newly drilled holes are not electrically connected with each other through the PCB.