How often does your pedal idea NOT work?

falco_femoralis

falco_femoralis

Well-known member
I've been working on a dual FV-1 reverb/delay in a 1590BX2 enclosure for a couple weeks and I just cannot get the layout right. Everything is a compromise. I'm just about ready to scrap the idea and reimagine it as two separate pedals. It's frustrating because I have another enclosure in the works that is beautiful and the idea came together with very little effort. I have some cool ideas for this one, but need to get past what is turning out to be a sizeable hump first.

How often does your pedal idea back you into a corner and make you wish you'd just done it an easier way?
 
When I deviate from the layout of a build, it’s seems about half the time or more I run into a snag. There’s been one time where I called it a fail. The others are in various states of completion because I the corner I painted myself into is frustrating. Some have been sitting for like a year!

But I’m usually glad I worked through it when I get one done.

I like your build style btw- those look challenging!
 
About 20% of the time my ideas won't work. Anther 15% I have kludge & gouge the enclosure to get it all to fit. But in your case, (pun intended), I suggest migrating to a Hammond 1590DE (7.88" in x 4.73" in x 2.53") enclosure size.

What precisely is the problem?
 
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does it “work” ? Yes, although I have never made any sort of exceptionally complicated mods to a circuit and I have always gotten them to “work” but do they always work and sound the way I hope? Nope there have definitely been a couple that were lack luster results I feel like was a waste of time aside from posterity. Leads me back to just because you can doesn’t mean you should. But that’s the name of the game, throw enough 💩 at the wall and something will stick.
 
Cybercow said:
About 20% of the time my ideas won't work. Anther 15% I have kludge & gouge the enclosure to get it all to fit. But in your case, (pun intended), I suggest migrating to a Hammond 1590DE (7.88" in x 4.73" in x 2.53") enclosure size.

What precisely is the problem?
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The problem is I am trying to keep my off board wiring to a minimum while also retaining enough room to correctly label all of the different controls of the Spatialist in its different modes while making the control layout intuitive and elegant. Also the DMD-2 is in there as well.

I like the bx2 enclosure because it fits my pedalboard well - the upper tier of my board is sized for horizontal pedals.

Also, I need to order knobs for it which means I need to decide on a layout first. But I need the knobs to mock it up and know for sure. My imagination is like bruh
 
75–80% don't make it past the breadboard. Of those that make it to layout, 20–30% will require one or more PCB revisions. Of those that make it to completion, 60% spend more than two months on the pedalbaord.
 
Aleph Null said:
75–80% don't make it past the breadboard. Of those that make it to layout, 20–30% will require one or more PCB revisions. Of those that make it to completion, 60% spend more than two months on the pedalbaord.
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How have you learned to deal with PCB revisions? What are some things you keep an eye out for?
 
falco_femoralis said:
How have you learned to deal with PCB revisions? What are some things you keep an eye out for?
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Standardizing as much as possible has helped to eliminate issues with inaccurate footprints and that sort of thing. Beyond that, revisions usually come from schematic errors or features that should have been more fully tested. For schematic errors, it's mostly been about going over everything with fresh eyes and comparing it to the bread board before submitting gerbers. For features, there are sometimes use cases that aren't easy to test, so problems don't show themselves until later. I had this happen recently with some switches on a build that would pop the first time (and only the first time) they were flipped after being powered on. I had to revise the PCB to include pull-down resistors to ovoid dangling caps.
 
falco_femoralis said:
The problem is I am trying to keep my off board wiring to a minimum while also retaining enough room to correctly label all of the different controls of the Spatialist in its different modes while making the control layout intuitive and elegant. Also the DMD-2 is in there as well.
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When I've run into off-board vs onboard wiring, I will often elect to go with more wires than to sacrifice control layout. When done, a pedal will 99.99% of its life closed up. One example is a "Sunn T" build I did where I wanted a very specific control layout and the board was not at all cooperative. So I just made it work and wound up mounting the board onto some thick, stiff foam with double-sticky tape and some Alien tape. Sometimes we have to get creative with our creativity. :cool:

AF_Sunn-T_1590BB_v01_Mockup_w-Hardware.png Sunn-T_Done_Guts.jpg
 
Plenty of my ideas don’t work as intended, I’m just glad JLC is cheap for 5 boards to try things out (if you have patience for the cheap shipping). I don’t bother breadboarding any more for the most part, sometimes.

I still don’t really have any idea what I’m really doing as far as layout design goes but it’s still fun so that counts for something. My discard pile of pcbs that didn’t work eclipses my completed builds I’m actually happy with by a country mile 😂
 
Everything I build always works every time.


But you just need a very broad definition for "works". My circuits are one part electronics to 10 parts semantics.
 
My solution is to not really do anything very special or complicated, and it works just fine most of the time. I've had a bunch of very close calls with jacks barely fitting, and stuff along those lines - ugly fixes that fix the issue, and frankly I don't care too much about how the innards look.

I am curious about learning breadboarding, circuit design and board layout stuff at some point, but I do have to factor in all the effort needed to learn that, plus all the effort dealing with the setbacks. I don't think you should necessarily think of it as a failure, more that it's just a part of the process.
 
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