Powering Line 6 FM4

[Austin73]

Having recently fixed my blown up FM4, thanks everyone by the way and yes it was just a 1n4001 blown was going to be charged 70 quid to fix it ha ha till I got the guts to get the iron on it.

Now I'm just wondering about powering this one with power supply rather than batteries but noticed some people have had problems using the one spot etc to power line 6 and other pedals at once. Is it just a amp issue ie needs more than 1.7 amps for all pedals to work correctly and also on the back of the pedal it does say 9vac does that cause a problem? And if I can still power it by dc is it tip negative?

Cheers in advance

Austin

[Processaurus]

Hi, good for you for fixing your pedal!  I have three of those line 6 pedals  and run them all and 10 other pedals off a 1 spot, using the funky 1 spot adaptors (one is Godlyke, I think).  The 4 button modeler takes about 210mA, even though it says 1000mA on the back.  The adaptor is a good thing because it reverses the polarity, the line 6 wants a tip positive input if you're using DC rather than AC.  I was going to convert mine to use a normal boss type 2.1mm jack with tip negative, but it turned out to be a pain in the ass to mod the board (and use the existing hole) to switch the polarity, plus the battery wouldn't work (because of the way the PS is hooked up, the switching/battery disconnect on the DC jack).  I thought about drilling a new hole and putting a panel mount 2.1mm jack in, but decided to just deal with the adaptors.

If you search Mr Huge posted a schematic of the power supply section, including how the battery is hooked up.  It makes sense why you can't change it to the normal boss type DC jack, once you see how the power is getting around.

I think it is safer with those temperamental pedals to power it from a regulated DC supply like the 1 spot, seems like variation in the 9vAC may be what leads to some of their widely documented problems/unreliability.

[Austin73]

Cheers for that Ben, more than enough info to get myself sorted. Although might go the home made route for the power supply so to speak, I did fancy an of the shelf  1.5 amp 9VDC Regulated power supply put in a new box with plenty of sockets with possibly separate sockets for the FM4.

Also just while your around to get 18 volts can I just add two of the outputs together to give me the required total? I'm sure I have seen adaptors that do this somewhere but just fancied a hard wired one instead of the MAX1044 route

Thanks so far

Aus

[Processaurus]

I did fancy an off the shelf  1.5 amp 9VDC Regulated power supply put in a new box with plenty of sockets with possibly separate sockets for the FM4.

Also just while your around to get 18 volts can I just add two of the outputs together to give me the required total? I'm sure I have seen adaptors that do this somewhere but just fancied a hard wired one instead of the MAX1044 route

Hi, do you mean starting with just a regular wall wart with a single output, or a voodoo labs pedal power type power supply?  If it is a normal power supply, it only has one output, so splitting it into parallel branches and then recombining those branches won't magically give 18v, it would just short it out (by connecting the + to the -).  If the power supply transformer has multiple secondary windings (like the voodoo labs), then they are electrically isolated from each other, and you can definitely add them together like you would two 9v batteries, to get 18v.

The aforementioned Mr. Huge is selling a bunch of stuffed pedal power-like PCBs, comes with the special multi winding transformer for 10 isolated outputs.  They are pretty big, but reasonably priced.

Man, it would be great if there were a commercial pedal power supply like the pedal power that was multiple switching power supplies, it could be small, light, and powerful...

[Austin73]

Feel a bit stupid now as I hadn't thought of that ooops so did a search for a pedal power and came across Diago . They do a power all will the usual line 6 etc but at the bottom of the page is an adaptor that gives you 18volts from an inline chip!

Alot smaller than the max1044 and only 10 quid so maybe could be used with any power supply

Worth Checking out anyway

Cheers

Aus