Tag Archives: Prototype

Prototype Boost Built, Testing to Come

February 15, 2017 Remy

Building on my work from a couple weeks ago, I put solder to iron and built up a first prototype of the boost circuit for my buddy’s 8-bit fuzz pedal. Th EagleCAD board layout I made earlier was almost exactly what I needed. However, because I was fumbling my way through the software I didn’t have the correct packages selected for all of the devices.

I tweaked the layout with the actual components I ordered from Digikey a few weeks ago. The biggest curveball was that I ordered some gigantic orange 1000pF caps. I just wasn’t looking that closely at packages when I ordered, but I had plenty of board to work with.

I hooked up some 1/4″ jacks to the I/O terminals and connected a 9V. I tested with my Epiphone Les Paul into a Focusrite Scarlet interface. The signal came through clear and clean, and there was no audible (to me at least) distortion as I rolled through the gain range.

I’ll take the board over to check out the performance characteristics on an oscilloscope soon. Then, I’ll start looking to shrink the footprint of the board as much as possible so I can cram it inside an existing pedal.

CAD, Design, Electronics, Guitar

Planning and Prototyping a Mosfet Boost Circuit

February 3, 2017 Remy

Long ago I promised my friend Nick a mod for a guitar pedal of his. His 8-bit fuzz pedal caused a volume drop that he couldn’t overcome by tweaking the settings, and he didn’t want to put a boost after because he would have to hit two pedals every time he wanted to switch to his fuzz. I had been looking at making a couple of different boost circuits and offered to put one in his pedal.

Now, some years later, I’m actually putting some effort into the project. The circuit I chose is the Mosfet Booster pedal from AMZ . The circuit was simple and would make for a very transparent gain stage. The idea is to make a small add-on board for his current pedal and wire the boost in line before the output jack.

I had seen a Hack-a-Day series about creating PCB’s in a number of different software, in particular a walk-through of using Eagle CAD. I’ve seen so many mentions of Eagle CAD over the years, but never used it. This simple circuit would make a good intro to the program.

Continue reading Planning and Prototyping a Mosfet Boost Circuit →

Arduino, Automation, Electronics, Garden

Garden Automation

November 9, 2016 Remy

In my previous apartment I had set up a few self watering planters I made from recycled kitty litter buckets. The planters have a reservoir of water that keeps the soil moist longer. It reduces maintenance, but I still needed to top off the reservoirs every few days. So of course I set about on trying to rig up something to refill them for me.

The idea was to have a larger enclosed tank that can resupply the smaller reservoirs of each planter. To accomplish this, my system would need to:

Monitor the level of the water in the reservoir
Engage a pump to transfer water from the tank to the planter
Disengage the pump

I had some IR transistors that I picked up a few years ago that never got used beyond turning on some LED’s and decided this would be the perfect application for them. I would use them to detect when the water in the planter got too low or too high.

The planter already had some basic floating water gauges. These were just bamboo stakes stuck into wine corks. I would use two thin slices of cork to trigger the IR sensors.

[Show slideshow]

This is a brief write-up of a project that has been postponed. I moved into a new place and my new garden setup doesn’t need this pump… yet.