bobson dugnutt
Active member
Hey pedal pals,
I've been building a few Informants for some friends; first one this morning went great (well enough to post in the build reports!), so I figured I'd have a go at another one. Essentially identical parts, all from the same order. It works! Until I go to box it up.
With everything secured in the enclosure, when engaged nothing happens, including the LED turning off. Since the dry signal passes through just fine when bypassed, that tells me right away it's a grounding issue, which would also explain why things were going great until the enclosure showed up. A little bit of troubleshooting later, I have it isolated to the DC jack; it seems the sleeve of the plug, by virtue of how the jack is constructed, gets grounded to the enclosure. This would make sense in a center positive world, but that is not the world we live in.
It seems the first build worked because the powder coating was thick enough to electrically isolate the power adapter, but on the second build it was not and my IO jacks were getting unexpected voltage (it is a miracle nothing is fried!). That's my theory, at least.
What I desperately need, though, is a sanity check! Digging deeper into the product page for the jacks (https://www.taydaelectronics.com/1614-19-lumberg-dc-power-socket.html), nothing pops out at me and screams "hey, watch out, we're going to connect the sleeve to whatever we're mounted to!" I'd also expect other people to run into the same issue.
So: am I crazy? Am I missing something about these jacks, or jacks in general? Am I the first person dumb enough to spend $4 on a DC jack and this is my punishment?
Thanks so much in advance!
I've been building a few Informants for some friends; first one this morning went great (well enough to post in the build reports!), so I figured I'd have a go at another one. Essentially identical parts, all from the same order. It works! Until I go to box it up.
With everything secured in the enclosure, when engaged nothing happens, including the LED turning off. Since the dry signal passes through just fine when bypassed, that tells me right away it's a grounding issue, which would also explain why things were going great until the enclosure showed up. A little bit of troubleshooting later, I have it isolated to the DC jack; it seems the sleeve of the plug, by virtue of how the jack is constructed, gets grounded to the enclosure. This would make sense in a center positive world, but that is not the world we live in.
It seems the first build worked because the powder coating was thick enough to electrically isolate the power adapter, but on the second build it was not and my IO jacks were getting unexpected voltage (it is a miracle nothing is fried!). That's my theory, at least.
What I desperately need, though, is a sanity check! Digging deeper into the product page for the jacks (https://www.taydaelectronics.com/1614-19-lumberg-dc-power-socket.html), nothing pops out at me and screams "hey, watch out, we're going to connect the sleeve to whatever we're mounted to!" I'd also expect other people to run into the same issue.
So: am I crazy? Am I missing something about these jacks, or jacks in general? Am I the first person dumb enough to spend $4 on a DC jack and this is my punishment?
Thanks so much in advance!