Low Tide

JamieJ

Well-known member
Almost drowned building this one. It needed three hours for me to troubleshoot the issues that were present for my build.

There was no sound at all when boxing it up so out came the trusty audioprobe. First issue was that both the J201 and the 2SK208-Y needed reflowing. I thought I had fried them but luckily didn't. This was my first go at surface mount soldering so I'm glad I didnt mess it up.

The next issue was a dodgy V3207D chip in combination with a colder solder joint on the pin 3 of the socket which is the input of the IC which made troubleshooting confusing.

I think I will go with the metal stamp lettering approach for this pedal at some point but I'm going to leave it blank for a while. All in all this is a great sounding pedal. I need to find the sweet spot for the BBD and gate trimmers but its not far off.

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Oooo... You're using the fancy trimmers with the knobbies!
If you don't have a scope, find the extremes on the BBD trimmer where the audio at pin 7/8 of the BBD starts to distort and set it in the middle. A scope might get you a little better but the benefit is for the most part negligible. The other trimmer you can adjust to taste or look at the Shallow Water manual that's available online and follow their suggestions.
Very neat work too.
I like my Low Tide, an interesting pedal
 
Looks great Jamie!

Because the layout utilizes nearly every mm of the enclosure, it's a tight build, with not much room for error.
Yeah I’m glad I managed to work through the issues. This is my first PedalPCB that hasn’t fired up first time. Obviously it’s a complicated build with loads of parts with is always going to result in more chance of errors on the builders end. I was one step away from creating a thread in the troubleshooting forum 🤣
 
This looks awesome! I've been looking into making one of these myself but am having a super hard time finding the BBD chip. Where were you able to find yours? (Also I realize this is a few months old at this point, so the pickings might be even slimmer now).
 
This looks awesome! I've been looking into making one of these myself but am having a super hard time finding the BBD chip. Where were you able to find yours? (Also I realize this is a few months old at this point, so the pickings might be even slimmer now).
A few people on the forum helped me out with one initially then I bought a batch from a guy on eBay. I think his store was called puretube. Where do you live?
 
Nice job buddy. Love a clean gut shot… I would normally give you crap about the bare enclosure but I think this is one of those pedals that it works. Well done.
 
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