Introducing JTEX Rock Mania

[JTEX]

At long last, I managed to put together a production-grade unit. Rock Mania is the much more polished successor to my previous Shockman. I only ever made a handful of Shockmen, as I felt that it wasn't complete without either a reverb or delay. Rock Mania now adds a PT2399-based delay, and exposes a whole bunch of tweakable parameters that were presets in Shockman, as well as in the various original SR&D Rockman headphone amps that inspired the whole project.

The name and color scheme hint at my country of birth, in addition to the usual suspects: rock and maniacs, of course

There are many technical details of Rock Mania that I'm quite proud of, but I'll just mention two right now:
- the entire box draws less than 12mA from a 9V battery (with all the LEDs on!), giving it over 40 hours of battery life. It's meant to be mobile, even pocketable (1590B !)
- I designed my own magnetic (no contact) stomp switches specifically for it

I'll go beer myself now.

P.S. I'll only make 10 Rock Manias, ever. It's waaaay, way too much work. Unless, of course, I somehow lose my day job and get hungry. I've been there for 20 years though, so I wouldn't hold my breath . I am, however, hoping to maybe sell the plug-in Rock Brain board on its own (it's the heart of the whole thing), so people can make whatever they want out of it. It's very flexible!

 

[drgonzo1969]

Very Cool! nice work!

 

[Feral Feline]

Happy Canada Day, @JTEX !

This is such a killer build.

I'm interested in a brain-board!

It looks like a whole lotta work, as you mentioned and have demonstrated by your chronicling its progress on the forum. So, maybe a Rock Mania pre-built, because ... that's a lot of work right there!

 

[JTEX]

Happy Canada Day, @JTEX !

This is such a killer build.

I'm interested in a brain-board!

It looks like a whole lotta work, as you mentioned and have demonstrated by your chronicling its progress on the forum. So, maybe a Rock Mania pre-built, because ... that's a lot of work right there!

Actually, the brain is very easy to make work in a simple configuration, with just a handful of external jumpers, resistors and caps. I started to write a datasheet for it - as if it were an IC, which it kind of is, in a way. Every stage is individually accesibile, in and out (buffer, compressor, distortion, EQ, chorus, delay, stereo mixer, headphone amp...). I've been talking with Robert and I'm hoping he'd be interested in making a DIY-friendly "motherboard" for it that would fit within the scope of PedalPCB. Rock Mania is a bear to make, but I will make 10 of it, so that hopefully I gain some traction for its brain - which I wouldn't mind making in some larger numbers. It still requires some significant manual assembly, but not as bad as the whole pedal.

BTW, it's not just a pedal. It works great as a desktop multi effect, or as a belt/strap pack. Even if you were to just use it as a headphone amp, it's a high quality one! (1x OPA1692 per channel). I threw everything I know at it.

 

[JTEX]

Real life battery test. 30 hours since power up with a fresh battery, still glowing green. Top LED will turn red when the battery drops to 7V.

 

[steviejr92]

Incredible work!

 

[Bricksnbeatles]

 

[PedalBuilder]

That’s just too cool. The magnet stomp/reed switches, the hypnotic SMD layout, oh, and all the features. I’ve seen some truly inspiring stuff on the forum, but the Rock Mania might just take the cake. Absolutely amazing work.

 

[JTEX]

Update: Like all self-respecting tech heads, I hate writing (or indeed reading!) documentation. By now though, there are enough Rock Manias out in the wild (um, about a handful...) that I felt I should put together a Quick Start Guide. I'm putting it here, not quite sure why. I do think I could have used a bigger font...