Hey, look at that! It's a poorly designed effect pedal, containing the Purple Peaker circuit as described on home-wrecker.com! (I mean, the outside is poorly designed; the innards are peerless!)
At the end of 2017 I started getting the itch to start building circuits again. Since we are a music-playing family, I have been looking at effects pedals for possible projects. You may be surprised to learn that there are a lot of circuit designs online for your own effects. Or you may not be surprised at all. This is the Internet, after all.
Among the sites that feature a lot of circuits is the previously mentioned home-wrecker.com and a few others that I enjoy.
- Effects Layouts
- DIYStompboxes.com
- Tagboard Effects (focusing on layouts for tagboard or stripboard)
- The Big Muff π page (devoted to the influential fuzz effect pedal)
- folkurban's circuit snippets page (archive.org link)
I've been enjoying reading the schematics and accumulating the knowledge on how to put together a circuit from a diagram. I've also been looking at stripboard (a type of PCB where all the holes in a row/column are electrically connected) and figuring out how to lay out stuff on that.
I'm not sure if I'm going to look at other circuits besides the ones for effects pedals, although I did recently design a small circuit for a project in progress (about which more later, hopefully). Like I said, it's been fun gathering the knowledge and learning how to solder and do all the fiddly bits that go into making a complete pedal.
On the off chance that someone reads this and wants to try a project, I recommend Bazz Fuss as a nice starter project. The circuit is simple enough for a beginner to put together, yet cool-sounding enough to actually be useful. Try putting that circuit together, and then get yourself a fancy enclosure to put your circuit in! Figure out stuff like: how to wire up the switch; how to lay out your components so that they all fit; and ways to provide easy access to the battery, in case it goes dead (I love the Bulgin 9V battery compartment for ease of use).