Bought my board. Where do I go from here?

[DuctTapeRiot]

Hi Monkey,

For your fat and bright switches , you just need wire to the center lug of the switch, and either of the two outer lugs.  You are using this "On-On" switch as a On-Off by not having anything attached to the third lug, and all it is doing is either breaking (off) or completing (on) that part of the circuit.

For star grounding, the idea as I understand it is that all your grounds should tie into one single point, and not form any loops.  In my pedals I run one wire from the isolated DC jack, to the Sleeve of my input jack, which then becomes the "Center" of my star, and other grounds run out from there.  So for example, the output jack is grounded from the input sleeve, through the encosure, to the sleeve of the output.  If you also ran a grounding wire from the output to input sleeve, you would be making a ground loop as the output jack would be grounded  2 ways, once through the wire and once through the enclosure.  Hope that makes sense?

[monkeyssj1]

oh man i'm so glad you replied this information. i'm just now working on the bright/fat switches


thanks d.t.r.

[monkeyssj1]

so i just finished the green bean.. its quite the frankenstein  and it works... BUT there's a HUGE dramatic volume drop and i'm not sure what it may be. The way the pedal was setup is kind of weird as well.... in that i drilled the holes on the enclosure kind of shittily and got to a point where either the input jack would touch the stomp switch or it would touch the 9v battery..

after spending hours and hours making this thing i needed to test it and i couldn't find an answer on the boards so i drilled another hole in the enclosure, stuck the 9v sleeve outside the case and ran the pedal with the battery outside the case. anyways not sure what may be wrong as all the switches seem to do what they were intended to do.

if anyone has any input, it would be greatly appreciated

[TNblueshawk]

Monk, I think at this point what I'd do is post some pics and put it up in the tech help forum. Get some good shots of both sides of the boards and all the jack and footswitch wiring. Without pics it is sort of a shot in the dark here.

Needless to say you can't have things touching each other but I guess you took care of that. It will short the signal to ground if you haven't.

Not sure if you wired with buffer or true bypass. If true bypass it sounds like some of that signal is leaking back into the board and or to ground, but that is where the pics come in handy for the experts....of which I'm not even close 

[monkeyssj1]

it works!

i'm shitting myself right now

[DuctTapeRiot]

Nice! What was the issue in the end?

[monkeyssj1]

i think it was the battery being outside??? i'm not sure... either that or a wire that was soldered to the board from the stomp switch was cold. the only issue i'm noticing now is a bit of fizzy squeals from the bright switch when it's activated... but i'm so happy. this pedal sounds wonderful

[TNblueshawk]

Did you do anything at all to fix it, or did you just pop it back in the box?

[monkeyssj1]

i did resolder a wire to the board that broke off when i was taking it out a third time... but before i'm pretty sure the solder connection on that wire to the board was fine. Other than that, i did nothing to fix anything other than try the battery in the box.... strange... but it sounds wonderful. I can't really hear the differences when the fat switch is on. can certainly hear the differences with the bright switch, so I think i'm going to go back later today or tomorrow and try to resolder the fat switch wires.

i just bought a tap tempo tremolo from musicpcb so i'm really excited to start that project next

[TNblueshawk]

Cool. Well, maybe it was something as simple as the signal was getting shorted the first time around but it is not now.

Sometimes some cap values are so close my ears don't detect much of a difference, but you should at least detect a slight difference when you switch it.

But, good luck.

[monkeyssj1]

just wanted to thank everyone who has posted on this board and offered there input. i've learned a lot in the past two weeks and there's no way i would've been able to complete this build without your guys' guidance or the forums wealth of information. definitely going to build the pedals i want from here on out.

thanks again everybody