I built one of these over two years ago (build report), based on @jjjimi84's excellent build report and demo. Actually, at the time, for reasons I don't recall, I bought and built two PCBs, assembled both, but only boxed up the one in the old build report. As we're having our basement finished, we're on a huge decluttering kick, and so I figured it was a good time to finally put this finished PCB in a case.
The other motivation was have a simple board suitable for testing the next revision of my microcontroller relay bypass board. With this PCB revision (v3.0), besides some cosmetic improvements, I did a few tweaks: fancy footprint that supports two different relays (Kemet EC2-3TNU or Panasonic TQ2-L2-3V); uses pic10f320 or 10f322 MCU; adds a "board power" solder hole for easy compatibility with AionFX boards. Actual MCU code is unchanged, though this is the first time I've made a PCB for the PIC MCUs (previously I've been using ATtiny).
Anyway, I sold the first Celestial drive I built quite a while ago. When I plugged this one in to test, I forgot how good it sounds! As I said before, @jjjimi84's demo does a great job showing what's good about this pedal. It's a quick and easy build too.
The build went mostly smoothly. Initially, I cheaped out and didn't put dust covers on the top two pots, and sure enough, I shorted the input jack tip to the pot case. I've since added the pot covers, and everything works as expected. As the actual effect is so simple (and I'd already built a working one), I was more concerned about having made a mistake on that fancy footprint for the relays. But everything worked just fine!
The wiring at the top is a bit messy, but otherwise it looks halfway decent. I'm happy with it.
The other motivation was have a simple board suitable for testing the next revision of my microcontroller relay bypass board. With this PCB revision (v3.0), besides some cosmetic improvements, I did a few tweaks: fancy footprint that supports two different relays (Kemet EC2-3TNU or Panasonic TQ2-L2-3V); uses pic10f320 or 10f322 MCU; adds a "board power" solder hole for easy compatibility with AionFX boards. Actual MCU code is unchanged, though this is the first time I've made a PCB for the PIC MCUs (previously I've been using ATtiny).
Anyway, I sold the first Celestial drive I built quite a while ago. When I plugged this one in to test, I forgot how good it sounds! As I said before, @jjjimi84's demo does a great job showing what's good about this pedal. It's a quick and easy build too.
The build went mostly smoothly. Initially, I cheaped out and didn't put dust covers on the top two pots, and sure enough, I shorted the input jack tip to the pot case. I've since added the pot covers, and everything works as expected. As the actual effect is so simple (and I'd already built a working one), I was more concerned about having made a mistake on that fancy footprint for the relays. But everything worked just fine!
The wiring at the top is a bit messy, but otherwise it looks halfway decent. I'm happy with it.
