Codtone Meatball

[Guitarmageddon]

Meatball envelope filter.



Pretty fun pedal, but a painful build for a number of reasons.
Taylor's projects are great, but his multilayer boards are extremely easy to wreck. Either get it right the first time or suffer the consequences. Desoldering nearly always will lift traces or worse, cause shorts. I had to rebuild the LED section on vero as swapping the Leds was too much for it. Luckily, despite having no less than 10 controls, it's a relatively simple circuit.



As I discovered was the experience of other builders here, all my Tayda LM1458s didn't work, but luckily I had one RCA chip which worked perfectly.
After considerable trial and error I found 3mm yellow leds worked best with my LDRs. Green 5mm seems to be popular, but I don't think it is about the color so much as the pairing of the leds to the ldrs. Green Leds just didn't put the sweep in a useable range with my ldrs.

Apart from a couple of days tweaking, the painful part was when I managed to plunge a small flathead screwdriver into the tip of my left index finger. Ouch! Won't be playing guitar for a couple more days at least. 
When I can, I'm going to play it a while, but have plans to fiddle with it a bit more too- going to try adding a LFO for a bit of fun

[Hexjibber]

Ouch!

Cool looking build though man, I like the gradient! I've got a board for one of these I will be doing at some point so will make a note of your experiences for when it comes to populating mine!

[alanp]

Glad you got it going! I made sure to order some 1458's from Mouser when I got some enclosures

Best control of all with the Meatball is the Range, in my experience. It lets you dial it in, exactly.

[selfdestroyer]

Great looking build and the fact that you stuck with it and fixed it is very inspiring. Cool gradient effect on the paint job also.

Cody

[Guitarmageddon]

Thanks guys.
I haven't played it enough yet, but I'm digging it so far.
Paint is just a few colors of rattle can.
Lots of controls, but they're all quite useful. I thought the rotary switches were a little overkill. It's certainly not necessary for the up/down control. I guess it was more for symmetry.
I'm keen to try your LT layouts Alan.

[LaceSensor]

good stuff as usual

what LDRs did you use?

[Guitarmageddon]

I bought a big bag of 100 cheap on ebay a while back, they varied from 100ohm-10k light thru 2-3Mdark. I sorted them roughly, and used a pair from my bag of "biggest range", though I wish measured them again before I used them so I could tell you exactly what they were...but would be less than 1k- 2M.

[raulduke]

Thats gorgeous mate.

Sublime as usual 

[Leevibe]

That's beautiful man. Very impressive. Where do you buy knobs?

[Droogie]

Nice build! Love me some Meatball.
How'd you get that color on the box? Totally awesome!

[LaceSensor]

I bought a big bag of 100 cheap on ebay a while back, they varied from 100ohm-10k light thru 2-3Mdark. I sorted them roughly, and used a pair from my bag of "biggest range", though I wish measured them again before I used them so I could tell you exactly what they were...but would be less than 1k- 2M.

cool
Ive tended to use 20k/2M in meatballs with green LEDs and its worked out pretty nice.

[bcalla]

Great build!
And thanks for the tip on the 1458s.  I have one of these half built & it's not working as I would expect.  I don't know where I got my 1458s, but I will try swapping it - or buying new ones if necessary.

[rullywowr]

Nice build!  Like the graphics and fade.

And I empathize with you, I have done the same exact "screwdriver through the finger thing".  Yikes!   

[m-Kresol]

I love the colour combination and the knobs. Good job!

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Great build!!!

Must have been on backlog for a while..... I dont think Taylor has had that PCB in stock for over a YEAR!!