Things With Strings

Still on holiday from work, but my back is on the mend thankfully. I've been tinkering with another pedal (more to come) and it's a bit of a strange one. It has an unusual switching mechanism which means that it's not bypassed in the usual way. I'd heard others report that this effect suffered volume loss when engaged, but my breadboarded circuit suffers from volume loss when in the signal path, engaged or otherwise. In fact, the volume difference between on/off states is negligible in my case. I wanted to try a few things, and one was whether buffering the effect would make any difference. So I conjured up an idea to make a plug-able buffer that I could use for this purpose now and in the future when breadboarding circuits. The circuit I used was the bi-polar transistor buffer circuit  described in the link, and here is what my finished item looked like. plug-in buffer In the end, this particular circuit didn't benefit from the addition of a buffer, but...

Today I was on holiday from work, but I'd also done some thing to my back that meant once I sat down, I was in danger of not being able to stand up again, and my intentions to go out on my bike and put some miles in were well and truly scuppered. So to keep myself active, and in a standing position, I decided to prepare a couple of boxes in advance. These were  1590A  size boxes and I was preparing them for some effect that will have a single control. First I printed out templates which I downloaded from madbeanpedals.com  and taped these to the boxes. Then I used a centre-punch to mark the location of each hole I wanted to drill in order to guide the drill. enclosures with drill templates and tools In the picture above, you can see the two enclosures with drilling templates attached, together with a centre-punch, a couple of step drill-bits and a 3mm drill-bit for the LED. And here is what a box looks like once it's been centre-punched. enclosure w...

Background I was talking to my brother-in-law last December and mentioned that I was hoping to re-ignite my electronics hobby, mainly with the intention of building myself some guitar effect pedals. A month later, my brother and sister-in-law kindly gave me an Amazon gift card for my birthday (always appreciated), so I had the idea that come his birthday, I would repay the gift with a boutique, hand-made effect pedal. And so the story of the "Chafer Drive" begins. I thought a simple overdrive (mild distortion) with a single control knob fitted into the smallest possible enclosure would be appropriate, and it would be named the "Chafer Drive" because that, coincidentally, is his surname. The name has a triple meaning though, since a Chafer is a variety of beetle, and there is a party-game called a Beetle Drive , so we have Chafer - Beetle - Over - Drive, get it? Never mind! I though I'd also document the whole build process too, so he (any anyone else who...

OK, what's this got to do with guitars and stuff? Well I've made a couple of DIY effect pedals in the past, and it's something I've been intending to do again once I'd got a bit more free time. This time I've decided I won't be inhaling those nasty fumes from my soldering activities! I was looking at my ever increasing scrap heap of old parts when I had an idea to convert an old computer power supply into a solder fume extractor. The idea being to remove all the internals (salvaging useful parts of course) leaving just the fan, then hook up a DC power source add a switch and pack the space inside with filter material. Pretty easy project really. One thing to note was I had to reverse the fan because it was blowing air out initially and I wanted the reverse. It's  amazing what stuff you find inside. Here are just a few of the salvaged parts some of the salvaged parts I added a DC jack where the power cord used to be. DC jack for wallwart ...

I hate to throw things away. I've had an old serial port MIDI interface lying around the house for 20 years doing nothing. It was from Windows 3.1 days, and was non-upgradable to Windows 95. But now it's time to bring it back to life. First some pictures... The Original Box Unboxed MIDI ports at the other end 25-pin serial port at one end My idea is to make it into a very simple sequencer based on the Arduino, with both MIDI in and out capability plus a bunch of other features whilst retaining the original box for nostalgia. So let's take a look inside and see if there is anything that can be salvaged... Internals Well, not much really, there are the ports which I can definitely use plus a few resistor, diodes and capacitors, some of which may be usable in my new project but probably not worth the hassle of unsoldering. Then there are 2 transistors, which I will save for other projects and what looks like an optocoupler on the MIDI-in side. The...