First 5 pedals I ever built, all of em work!

[Advoc]

So I've been pretty DIY crazy for most of my adult life, and in music that started with my first Warmoth guitar which I built sometime in 2007.  It was from that forum that I learned about BYOC for pedal building, but I never bought a kit because they were about as expensive as a commercially produced pedal, so I never bothered, but when I discovered you can buy just the PCBs so inexpensively I had to try, and Mad Bean Is the first ones that I've tried.

I ordered these PCBs about 3 1/2 years ago and was working on them at university when I got bored (I was a Masters student so I had a shared office I could use which was nice).  But I got separated at the end of 2016 and I'm *almost* finished with the divorce, but in the mean time a lot of my stuff has been locked up in storage, so it took me a long time to get back to this project and I'm just really excited about it so I thought I'd post here.  I don't know if this is interesting to you guys or not because I get the feeling that most of you could do this in your sleep and make a flawless product, I struggled a lot to get this far because the extent of my electronics knowledge is whatever I could manage to scrounge up doing Adafruit Arduino tutorials and reading Steve Gibilisco's electronics book.

So I'll share my journey, but you can just skip over and look at the pictures if you like.

First one I started working on when I first bought the board was the GreenBean. I figured I had never used or owned a Tube Screamer so this was a good place to start. I decided not to go with the stock version because I like extra switches and have never had nostalgia for something having to be completely original.  I completely finished the build but it didn't work when I went to test it, but that was because my version of testing then was to wire all of the switches and jacks up to the board and try it out dissected on the table, but one of the wires broke from metal stress and I didn't realize it at first.  So after that it went into a ziploc bag for 3 years and I didn't even start any of the others.
In the end I replaced all the pots with proper 90 degree PC mount pots, and tried them again on my test bench and it worked first try.  I could have done a cleaner job the LED Diodes, but they work so I'm not touching it.



The rest I worked on all at once with a short break because I had to get some more parts.

The Pig Butt was next.  There's nothing fancy about this one as it mostly just worked fine.  I think I'm going to replace the TB switch though because the lugs wouldn't fit so I used some snips and a file to file them down so they'd fit in the hole, but I think I damaged the switch, it seems to cut out when I toggle it to one side unless I put it in the perfect spot.  I don't have any more DPDT toggles, so I might just use a stomp switch that I have instead and make it a bit unique.  I also didn't have any 150pF Caps so in C6 I jammed a 100pF and 47pF into the through-holes and soldered them in.  If I understand correctly, caps wired in parallel *add* capacitance.  So that should give me 147pF in that spot which should be good right?  It sounds great so I'm going with that.



The Slow Loris was an interesting build, mainly because it was pretty easy.  The hard part was sourcing an LM308, which if I were experienced at this game, I suppose I would have known.  I did some forum reading and came across a post somewhere that said a guy was going to try a TL071 with no slew capacitor (c3) So I gave that a shot.  It works, but I don't really like the sound of it, (I'm also very unfamiliar with the RAT so I might just not be a rat fan?) I did end up getting a ua308HC from Small Bear, which is supposed to be a direct replacement for the LM308, so I'd like to put that in and solder the slew cap in place, which I think is 30pF iirc.  I just don't know how to mount the opamp.  Am I correct in assuming the peg with the little tab sticking out over it goes in the through hole that is a square?  Then the rest just line up.  I thought it was weird that the PCB has a DIP8 shape, but the op amp it wad designed for is a circle.  In any case, that's one last tweak I want to do before boxing this thing.



Next is the Nom Nom, which was more complicated than I expected, not because of the circuit itself, just in making sure all the little pieces were organized and calibrated correctly.   Firstly, I didn't realize that the TL074 was a DIP14, not a DIP16, and all I had was 8 and 16 pin sockets.  So I spent some time doing very careful surgery with a utility knife cutting the last 2 pins off a socket so I could properly mount the IC.  Worked just fine I'm happy to report.  I get most of my parts from Tayda because if you're willing to wait for them the value is outstanding.  But they didn't have any 25k trim pots.  The actual bourns style one you see at the top I actually took from a friend who had a few.  He had built a NomNom before as went through the trouble of matching his jfets, so he gave me 2 pairs that were matched pretty closely that he had kept.  Would have been better to get a perfectly matched set of 4, but the phasing works, although I'm still not sure what the feedback switch really does, I don't hear much of a different when I toggle it, and adjusting the T2 trimmer doesnt' seem to do anything.  Not sure what that's about, but the basic one knob phase 90 functionality seems to work fine so I'm not complaining.



The PorkBarrel i was pretty excited about. I had started populating the resistors using the wrong build guide though, as I was using the 2019 version until I posted here asking where to find the old ones not realizing there was a link on the website for legacy circuits.  I had a boss chorus once. It was a weird one I never saw anywhere else, all I remember was that it had 3 knobs, and one of them was just a rotary switch with 2 options, and the pedal had a stereo output.  Other than that all I ever used were chorus effects in multi-effects processors.  I did have a friend who had a genuine CE-2 though, and I'm hoping this thing sounds good on bass too.  For the higher part count, this thing was actually a breeze to build, once I managed to source the IC's anyway.



Then to test it all I needed a test bench.  I didn't actually follow the mad bean tutorial for that one because I just didn't have the time or space right now to build something quite so elaborate, so all I wanted was a stompbox with a bread board that I could plug the boards into and test whether or not they worked.  This is what I came up with.









What amazed me was that once I finished this thing, every single one of my pedals that I plugged in worked first time.  The idea of troubleshooting these builds fills me with such anxiety because I am not experienced in this at all.  But I consider this a huge success, and now all I have to do is box them up.  I'll be putting the phaser and chorus each into a 1590B, I hope they fit. (The Tayda pc mount pots have leads that are just a tiny bit longer than normal I think, because the edges of the pots stick out over the edge of the board)

The 3 dirt pedals I'm going to put into a single enclosure, probably a 1590DD.  I'll stack them Fuzz > OD > DIS and just have it be one big dirt box.  I like that idea.

Thanks for reading if you did.  I'm an overly excited newb and had to share with somebody.

[alanp]

You're on a roll! All very good stuff

[woolie]

Very fun. Good job.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[gordo]

Interesting to see how each successive board looks markedly better than the previous one.  Nicely done and glad to see you're enjoying it.  I sometimes think this is more of a disease than a hobby but I love it all the same.

I've been doing this for a very long time now and am just getting into the arduino stuff and it feels like I'm starting all over again.

Welcome aboard!

[oip]

great job!

hell yes to the stompbox with breadboard!  it's extremely handy