New PS1A build

[juansolo]

We don't make pedals any more... But we're still trying to thin the stash a bit and one of our friends was wanting to buy the PS1A. Not a pedal we'd sell, but Cleggy remembered there was a board out there that we'd given another friend, got in touch to see if they were going to build it and if not if they'd be prepared to part with it. Planets align and we end up making our first pedal in many years.

So the parts mountain was a bit diminished. Buying parts for a single build isn't fun... Thankfully Cleggy still had a matched set of trannies kicking around, just in case. No epoxy meant no envirotex, and not worth buying any for a single build. So it's in a plain old Hammond, and they didn't have the bigger one in stock I wanted to put it in, so this is what we got... It's not my tidiest installation, but it is a little too snug for this effect truth be told. As usual Cleggy did all the board builds as that side of things tends to bore me, and I did the installtion as that's the bit I like.

Still the best phaser out there.

[jimilee]

That is all the way full. Nice! Do you have a schematic kicking around by chance?


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[gordo]

Always a great day when Juan posts :-)

[juansolo]

That is all the way full. Nice! Do you have a schematic kicking around by chance?

Board is an AlanP jobbie. It's not an easy build as the matching of the trannies is essential. Also you need a bipolar PSU and a Klon buffer on the input. I'll attach the docs.

I've also got the original build info somewhere, that's a layout of the original board though and we modded that a lot to work. I'm fairly certain most of the changes are already part of Alan's layout (Cleggy built the board so I'm unsure if he had to mess with it).

Ignore the bit on the right of the power supply, that was me trying to work out the pinouts of both packages. The inline one is MUCH easier to use.

[jimilee]

Nice, thank you sir!

[alanp]

Always nice to see one of these PCBs out in the wild Also nice to see you didn't put one of the jacks right on top of the LFO again

So glad I have a 12V AC adaptor lying around, it makes the power situation for this pedal so much easier.

[juansolo]

Always nice to see one of these PCBs out in the wild Also nice to see you didn't put one of the jacks right on top of the LFO again

Yeah we learned from our mistakes on that one!

So glad I have a 12V AC adaptor lying around, it makes the power situation for this pedal so much easier.

This one runs from 9v due to the bipolar PSU we're using. Makes life much easier.

[nzCdog]

Nice job! Oh, interesting that you've moved on from pedals? Great to see this build. Hope you've been well 

[juansolo]

Nice job! Oh, interesting that you've moved on from pedals? Great to see this build. Hope you've been well 

Yeah we just got to the stage where it was no longer self funding and we'd built so many we'd kinda burned out. We repair and refurbish vintage computers and consoles now. It's something to do. For example, along with our own stuff, we've been working through a guy's huge collection of obscure vintage kit for over a year now (and I still don't think we're near the end of it!). Most of these machines are 40ish years old and were never designed to work with UK or modern gear. Mainly we end up modding them for power, and video/sound output. They're almost all Japanese or US RF which just doesn't work here. So taking his kit he's had for years and making it finally work is actually quite rewarding and we've become ninjas at wrangling analogue video signals. Plus you never know what you're getting next. Keeps it interesting.

[nzCdog]

Nice job! Oh, interesting that you've moved on from pedals? Great to see this build. Hope you've been well 

Yeah we just got to the stage where it was no longer self funding and we'd built so many we'd kinda burned out. We repair and refurbish vintage computers and consoles now. It's something to do. For example, along with our own stuff, we've been working through a guy's huge collection of obscure vintage kit for over a year now (and I still don't think we're near the end of it!). Most of these machines are 40ish years old and were never designed to work with UK or modern gear. Mainly we end up modding them for power, and video/sound output. They're almost all Japanese or US RF which just doesn't work here. So taking his kit he's had for years and making it finally work is actually quite rewarding and we've become ninjas at wrangling analogue video signals. Plus you never know what you're getting next. Keeps it interesting.

I'm glad to hear your adventures continue.
Vintage computer tech is cool for so many reasons! We had Commodore 64's when I first discovered computer games at 5-6 years old.  The computers at school used 5 1/4" floppies... but I had a friend whose C64 loaded from cassette tapes 

[juansolo]

Tapes were the most common medium in the UK during the 8-Bit era (which was huge here). Sinclair Spectrums, Commodore 64's and Amstrad CPCs being the most dominant machines and all were usually cassette as they were easy to copy... (Piracy was rife). There were odd people with Atari's and BBC Micros with floppies, but the cost of those machines here made them pretty rare at home. At school, everything was BBC. It wasn't until the 16-Bit computers came along that floppies became mainstream.

[artstomp]

Interesting build as always by Juansolo...did you use radio button type switching on the PS1A build?

[Aentons]

It's funny this was brought up. I just dug out my C64 from when I was a kid and it's been sitting on the dining room table because I couldn't find the power adapter just yet.

[cooder]

Thanks for posting and great to see another Juansolo Cleggy pedal seeing the light of day. And what a classic!

[alanp]

Now Juan is making me think of manually cutting those notches into 5.25" floppies to turn them into double sided discs. (Only rich people had those custom notch-cutting devices.)