FERAL's imPERFect LAYOUTS

[Feral Feline]

Thought I'd start a thread to share my layouts, get feedback on them, and hopefully have some fun.
This sub-forum seemed the logical place to knot the thread.

I use DIYLC for my perf-layouts (though I have Eagle) because I spent an inordinate amount of time learning how to use DIYLC and it's where I'm comfortable now — for the moment. Tried getting up to speed on Eagle a few times, but... maybe later.

I originally started doing perf layouts mainly because I wanted to build stuff that wasn't available on PCB and prefer perf to vero, another reason was I didn't think I had the skills or knowledge to lay out PCBs. However...
Now I'm getting back into perf layouts for some of those same original reasons, but also as a dojo to train up and prepare for laying out my own PCBs.
Ready or not here I come, PCB fabricators.


So, for the first thread-entry I've spent the last few days tinkering with a clean blend for @jrhevron and myself. Here's the first draught:




The perf above was put together based on the schematic in this PDF:

http://www.rutgerockhorst.com/nucleonfx/documentation/fusion.pdf

In turn, Fusion's based on Jubal81's Schooner.


Instigated to lay this one out by posts in this thread:

J

TUTORIAL Thread 'Why Your Clean Blends Suck ... or "How to (Clean) Blend"'

Feb 16, 2024

Since there have been a couple of threads on the topic of "I want to do this pedal but with a clean blend" and "I want to blend two circuits" and I don't want to repeat myself all the time, here is a bit about clean blends. I have zero electronics background, am a self-taught pedal nerd and won't be able to answer ALL technical questions they arise. I am more of a f*ck-around-and-figure-it-out guy who loves to keep things reasonably simple, but also loves if things are engineered nicely.

So that being said, this is how to blend...

1. Buff n Blend

The...

• jesuscrisp
• Replies: 11
• Forum: The Test Kitchen

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I chose to go for some added gain to the clean-blend, but haven't worked out the exact values yet. The PDF says

"If the effect you’re blending is running above unity signal levels, it can be difficult to blend in the clean signal in a desired ratio. To remedy this you can boost the cleans by adjusting R2 and R3. The gain is calculated as . So R2 = R3 = 47kΩ gives a (voltage) gain of 2. Change R2 to 22kΩ will give gain of roughly 4."

I don't quite get what a gain of "4" means. Four times the voltage? Increase of 4dB? What does this compare to?
Nucleon's designer mentioned the same thing in a DIYSB thread, username ROCKHORST:

Idea for a clean blend circuit - feedback wanted - Page 2

Idea for a clean blend circuit - feedback wanted - Page 2

www.diystompboxes.com

Any advice on sorting out the clean's GAIN would be welcomed.


INVERSION
Another feature of the circuit in the PDF is it can be built to invert the phase of the wet-signal.
I thought it'd be more utilitarian to have both inverting and non-inverting available at the flip of a switch, so I worked that out.
I've included a mockup of the switch with the perf layout, 'cause it helped me determine whether or not it was feasible to switch between inverting/non-inverting so it might help others, too. That switch took some time to figure out, but as is usually the case it was more straightforward than I thought.

The main layout itself positions the two pots and switch such that it should fit a 3-knob PedalPCB template with a little wiggling.
One pot's legs are oriented vertically and the other's horizontally, to give better support to anchoring the perf and avoid possible strain on solder joints that all pot-legs on the same axis are susceptible to. Bonus: it's more compact than having the pots side by side.

The control layout would look something like this, with the bypass LED:

✹

​

That's about it, for now. Wasn't able to sleep last night, so once again posting half drunk from sleep-deprivation — I'll never learn.
I'm sure there will be errors in this post I'll have to fix later.


Thanks to Nucleon's Rutger Rockhorst for working up this clean-blend in the first place.

NEXT UP...
...I'll post a booffster: Just prior to the Nucleon Clean Blend, I mashed together Jerry Garcias Tiger Preamp with Mr Noir's Boosty Tigress.

 

[Feral Feline]

Well, I'm still stuck in Somnia, so I might as well post the next imPERFection confection; Meet the...

BLACK
BENGAL
BOUFSTER!


As mentioned above, this is JG's preamp-buffer that was stuffed into his Tiger geetar, fed by a Mr Black Boost Tiger.
It is only now, that I realise I wish I'd stuck the BUFFER in FRONT of the BOOST. Why?
Because maybe the boost will push the Buffer into ugly distortion? I don't know.

There are two layouts below, but electronically both are the same-same, each containing the Buffer and the Boost.
So what's the diff?
The one with jacks and related accoutrement has the boost on the left and the buffer on the right.
The smaller layout is ... plus petite, mes chers, and has the buffer on the left of the boost.

I've not included the RefDes 'cause I haven't consolidated a schematic of the two circuits yet, having worked up the layout(s) from their own separate electron roadmaps.


I really should've done this in 2022, Year of the Tiger.







So, I may revisit this with a proper schematic and a new layout that puts the booster AFTER the buffer.
Meanwhile, if you choose to build this imPERFect Boufster, I'd breadboard it before committing it to perfboard, an asylum, or Hairy Kerry.


Thanks to ...
the Demigod of DIYLC,
Dave aka Storyboardist for the lovely DIYLC-thingamabobdoohickies so I didn't have to agonise over a relative sea of component capsizes,
Doug Irwin for making Tiger and John Cutler its preamp-buffer, and whoever made that circ public,
Mr Deville for kindly sharing his Boost Tiger schematic to the DIY community (His schem matches the trace!).

Special Thanks also to Robert, and you, my PPCB brethren and sistren, for providing inspiration and for reading this.



Now, if you want my advice building this, go ...
HERE,
HERE,
and
HERE
and you're as good as golden.

IF you absolutely must have the Tiger-pre in the mix, do just that up on perf, but not on vero, and sandwich it with the above replacing the middle "HERE" .








HERE, = Black Tiger Boost
HERE, = Kliché Buffer
and
HERE = 3PDT Breakout w/ buffer-sw



PS a daze later: BUFFER SPDT = ON-ON, NOT ON-OFF-ON as one might be led to believe the way I placed the text around it.
Don't post when you're punchy from severe lack of sleep.

 

[Nostradoomus]

 

[VanWhy]

This is cool stuff. Thanks for posting this @Feral Feline. I've been looking to try perfboard after doing a handful of stripboard. Probably not the best place to ask this but can you recommend some quality perfboard to buy?

 

[Feral Feline]

I can, but I'm not sure you could find it on your own — Ap Lui Street's street-market stalls do a good job of hiding the store-fronts ... you'd never spot the store for the stalls.

It's best to have someone who already knows where it is take you there, nightmare to find on your own.

If you must lone-wolf it, I recommend going by MTR; take exit A2 and go across the street kitty-corner, turn right. Take the sidewalk immediately in front of the stores behind the stalls, if you stay out on the street between the stalls, you'll miss it for sure. It's about 1/3 the way down the street on the left-hand side... Pic will help:

This is the view after coming out of MTR Exit A2,
See the green enclosed-balcony in the upper right of the pic? The entrance to the shop is street level just below and about 6 shops (not stalls) beyond that.


This is where I got most of my perf:

That's just the entrance, you have to go in and up a flight of stairs to get to the goodies.

There's a few other shops where I got perf, maybe even a bit cheaper, but this is probably the biggest shop and has a good selection of caps, transistors, diodes, switches, etc, too — great selection of instrument and mic cable, spools of Belden, Sommer and Canare etc so get as much or little as you need, but alas no Mogami. I tended to do most of my shopping there when I couldn't get what I wanted from Tayda.

WECL is the English name of the shop, but the English-side of WECL's website... needs sprucing up. I've tried to order online, but without any success.

Man I miss that street. Nothing like it here. Nothing like it in all of Canada.
I'm running low on perf, but won't be back in Hong Kong until about a year from now... I could take you there, then.

 

[Feral Feline]

This is cool stuff. Thanks for posting this @Feral Feline. I've been looking to try perfboard after doing a handful of stripboard. Probably not the best place to ask this but can you recommend some quality perfboard to buy?

Probably not the best place because I don't know, but should be a good place because the thread's all about PERF; but not the best place 'cause I gave you a smarty-pants answer above. 'Tis all true, though, just not my own pics.
TTBOMR, I've never bought perf online, mostly at that shop and a few other HK shops.

What I do recommend is make sure you're getting fibreglass or similar boards, because I got some cheap phenolic-perf and over time it warped to hell — so if you build a circuit on phenolic, there's a good chance you'll get some cold solder-joints eventually as the board starts to curl up.

The downside of the fibreglass is of course it's harder to cut to size and you should wear a mask and eye-protection and gloves — those little microscopic glass-fibres are evil when set loose into the atmosphere.


EDIT: Was hunting for some stuff in my general-stash when I came across some perf NOT in with my perf/vero stash:

StompBoxParts 14767 Qty: 1​

B3 PCB-1100-307___________________​

Strip Board 44x32 Holes – 1590BB Size​

I must've had something specific in mind for this at one point. Unlike me to order 1 of anything — then again, maybe I was just getting one to sample. It says stripboard, looks like perf. IT IS STRIPBOARD.

SBP has perf. Can recommend SBP as a solid company to deal with: They came through big-time one time when one time I screwed up big time.

 

[VanWhy]

Probably not the best place because I don't know, but should be a good place because the thread's all about PERF; but not the best place 'cause I gave you a smarty-pants answer above. 'Tis all true, though, just not my own pics.
TTBOMR, I've never bought perf online, mostly at that shop and a few other HK shops.

What I do recommend is make sure you're getting fibreglass or similar boards, because I got some cheap phenolic-perf and over time it warped to hell — so if you build a circuit on phenolic, there's a good chance you'll get some cold solder-joints eventually as the board starts to curl up.

The downside of the fibreglass is of course it's harder to cut to size and you should wear a mask and eye-protection and gloves — those little microscopic glass-fibres are evil when set loose into the atmosphere.

Right on. Apologies if we took the thread off the rails. I don't want to take away from the excellent layouts you are putting out there.

 

[Ginsly]

A) Bookmarked! I've done more stripboard, but I really dig perf too.

B) Speaking of board materials - how do you tell? No clue if this Tayda vero is one or the other, for instance...

 

[Feral Feline]

s

Right on. Apologies if we took the thread off the rails. I don't want to take away from the excellent layouts you are putting out there.

Not derailled at all, absolutely on topic.

Not sure if the layouts are excellent or not, haven't built them so maybe I put an audio path too close to power and get noise or...;
people with more experience might see a better way to route things. A part of the reason to post some layouts, invite critique.

I'm still at a point where I'm happy if I can simply manage to get everything on the board, and minimise jumpers.
I did a layout a long time ago where I crammed a PS-1 into a 1590N1, then realised I needed to better separate the LFO from the audio portion of the circuit and the power and grounding of the LFO shouldn't be the same as the power and grounding of the audio path.

WTH? They're both going to be grounded at the same point in the end, at the DC jack at one end of the pedal!
I must've had at least 8 layouts of that circuit, 'cause I was trying to cram 1590BB size circuit into 1590N1 space and kept running into dead-ends — I abandoned it once LectricFX came out with a 1590BB-sized PCB for it.


I guess that's next, post a few of my OLD really OLD layouts where I didn't care at all if it looked nice and symmetrical so long as everything was on board in the absolute smallest space possible. At some point I realised agonising over the position of 3 components for hours trying dozens of positions wasn't going to make enough difference, that the layout that fit a 1590B would still need a 1590B and would never fit a 1590A. Time consumed wasn't commensurate with the degree of layout improvements.
I'll try to find my old backup drive and see if I can post some early perf attempts.


Meanwhile... I'll also see if I can dig up some inbetweeners as well, more recent layouts but not the latest;
then I can compare and see if I've improved my layouts at all in any way shape form.

A) Bookmarked! I've done more stripboard, but I really dig perf too.

B) Speaking of board materials - how do you tell? No clue if this Tayda vero is one or the other, for instance...

Vero is truly difficult for me. As much as I deride it, I'm actually in awe of people who can wrap their brains around it. It takes too much energy for me to do so; perf is nice and linear — some of the reasons people hate/dislike perf are the exact reasons I like it. I don't mind "laying tracks" while others prefer the quickness of vero's pre-existing tracks. Vero... the signal just bounces around too much — and admittedly my vero-BUILDING efforts using a known good layout (obviously not my own!), well, I've just not had much success with vero. I find it more difficult to work with than perf.

Home-etching. Not tried etching boards myself. I ordered two boards (same circ) custom hand-etched by someone who knows what they're doing; The first was such a disaster what with lifting traces and having to bodge around the lifted traces ... in the end, the pedal's LT1054 had a meltdown and tried to take everything around it with it. That was another punt in my butt, pushing me towards routing my own PCBs but having them produced at a proper foundry.


MATERIALS
When I was in the bike industry a lifetime ago before everything was online, I had 4 THICK phone-book sized parts-catalogues from which to select components for spec'ing on bikes (wasn't my job to do so, but I was asked to help with specs) — if you took out the stems (bit connects the handlebar to the frame/fork) from each catalogue, you'd have another phone-book tome of just stems. Each book's stem-section had pages full of pics about 3cmx5cm (1"x1.5") of stems — 64 or so per page or whatever it was, so, a hella LOTTA stems with only a thumbnail and brief description of size/specs/angles/diameters.

Pages of seemingly identical stems — pot-metal, cheap-steel, better steel, chromoly, good chromoly, cheap aluminum, better aluminum, heat-treated aluminum, extruded aluminum, forged aluminum, hydro-formed aluminum, and different levels of titanium, carbon-fibre, titanium lugged with bonded carbon-fibre... okay the last few don't look at all like pot-metal

Price. Mainly price, and then discussing with the supplier and getting feedback from them and then having sample stems sent to us. Two titanium stems arrive, one looks like it was welded with Double-Bubble and the other had neat little pancakes all layered evenly spaced in a straight line.
Sometimes you get what you paid for, sometimes you need to chalk it up to edification and the overall cost of doing business and occasionally/rarely/once-in-a-blue-Moon-Unit you get more than what you paid for.


How to tell what boards are phenolic? 1) Email Tayda and ask; 2) order one of each of the ones you're interested in see for yourself.
I know that if the board is brown, I'm wary — might be phenolic but could be fibreglass;
if the board is green, it's more likely fibreglass. The one you linked to at Tayda is probably fibreglass, similar to ones I've seen/have. Phenolic is never translucent (not that I've ever seen).

How thick is the board, though? How thick does it need to be to be solid and not flex thus breaking solder-joints?

I'm still learning about all this. I don't have any concrete answers.

 

[Feral Feline]

Already posted elsewhere on the forum:

When I exported the above out of DIYLC into a PNG, I was disappointed that the "locked" board version wasn't exported, it was locked when I exported it.

When you LOCK something in DIYLC, it appears lighter, fainter, more translucent. I like to LOCK the board when I'm doing a layout because:

A) When you drag and drop components, it doesn't matter if you miss a component and accidentally grab the board, it's locked and won't move.

B) Easier on the eyes, while you work you can see the components and traces better. It's just better all 'round.


If you've never used DIYLC and start using it, you'll understand almost immediately why the LOCK feature is useful, for components, traces, boards, text...

SO, I figured out how to lighten the board, as evidenced in the first two PERFs posted in the thread.
With the board unlocked, click on it to pull up its properties and right at the top of the pop-up window is a horizontal slider control labelled
"ALPHA"
and it is preset fully to the right, ie fully opaque.




Here's the Moosapotamus 360 layout again with the boards lightened: 50% for the refdes on the left, 66% for the values on the right and a super light 25% for the trace-only. Let me know what you think.

 

[Feral Feline]

Edited a post above, but in case it's missed and anyone's still looking:
StompBoxParts has perf, and I've not ordered it, but I've had good experiences dealing with SBP.