Droppin' some volts and oscillation

[Perrow]

LM317 in a to-92 package, a few resistors and caps? Seems about the same component count.

[Gus]

A LM317 is not a shunt regulator it is a series regulator.  How many components are in the LM317?
Sometimes it is fun to do things a little different.

[John Lyons]

Thank you GUS.
I will try this.
The cap before Q3 in my schematic (which is very similar to your fuzz here)
is 2uf. I'll lower it and see what I get.

[Perrow]

A LM317 is not a shunt regulator it is a series regulator.  How many components are in the LM317?
Sometimes it is fun to do things a little different.

Yeah, different may be fun but if it gives you trouble...

As for component count, the way I count is I look at the PCB and go one, two, three... any other way requires way to much research as soon as you have an op amp on the board

[kaycee]

So, without coming across as too much of a tree-hugger -  if I'm dropping 240 volts out the wall, down to 9 volts in the wall wart, then 1.5 volts at the regulator, am I 'wasting' a lot of electricity and would it be better just to stick a darn battery in there

[Gurner]

So, without coming across as too much of a tree-hugger -  if I'm dropping 240 volts out the wall, down to 9 volts in the wall wart, then 1.5 volts at the regulator, am I 'wasting' a lot of electricity and would it be better just to stick a darn battery in there

Because dead batteries are good for the planet?!! The waste you refer to is dispensed as heat (in the regulator).....how much heat is wasted relates to the current drawn on the 1.5V side of your regulator .....I don't think you'll ever see this '1.5V regulator wasted heat' topic raised at a Kyoto Protocol committee meeting (polar bears of the world rejoice)

[R.G.]

So, without coming across as too much of a tree-hugger -  if I'm dropping 240 volts out the wall, down to 9 volts in the wall wart, then 1.5 volts at the regulator, am I 'wasting' a lot of electricity and would it be better just to stick a darn battery in there

One of the really sad effects of the environmental movement as it has become politicized is that it leads people to come up with very strange thoughts about what's good and bad for the planet. No politician will ever pass up the chance to (a) get the voters (or peasants) scared about something, doesn't much matter what and (b) get them to modify their behavior in ways that benefit the politician. If that leads to odd behavior on the part of the peasants, well, so what. 

Voltage tells you *nothing* about how much energy or pollution happened. As Gurner notes, what comes closer is how much heat is wasted, because all the watts that went into making the heat were spent. Whether it was wasted or not, or polluting or not depends on a complex chain of how the energy was acquired.

In point of fact, the conversion from 240Vac to 9Vdc can be remarkably close to lossless. In fact, it must be, by law. Governments have taken to making non-switching wall warts illegal to sell because they waste a watt or two of power. So the switchers can convert at efficiencies of over 90%. A transformer making 9Vac out of 240Vac may be 98% efficient if well designed.

And from the tree hugging perspective, I suppose it matters where the 240Vac came from. We're all to believe that if it came from wind or solar sources, then it's more moral than from other sources. In point of fact, it's all, 100% of it, from our only fusion generator - the sun - unless it comes from a fission nuclear plant. Nuclear power plants are the only non-fusion source of energy we have. All fossil fuels and biofuels are stored fusion energy, albeit stored at low efficiency.

As for dead batteries being good or bad for the planet - how is that, again? 100% of the materials in that battery were already here on the planet. By making a battery out of it (using stored fusion energy, most likely) and expending the battery, we have changed what was already on the planet by not one single atom. For perspective, it helps to remember that among the things that are organic and 100% natural are anthrax and ebola virus.

Governments desperately want people to NOT think about what happens. They want people to support the program of the day, under the guise of doing the right thing. The real problem with the planet is that there are too many people for what they do to be insignificant. You will probably never hear a government talk about that, for obvious reasons.

[K Zustang]

I am also here on the same mission:
I built my own version of a Maestro Fuzz Tone based on the FZ-1 and FZ-1A. It is a mixture between the two and :
1. it's PNP Germanium with positive ground
2. Uses 1.5V with a single AA battery.

I would like to use my regular -9V charge pump and to reduce the voltage in the circuit down to 1.5V.
The problem is that both voltage dividers and series resistors managed to get the voltage down but the circuit oscilates like crazy and the current and voltage are not regulated and keep fluctuating when the knobs are tweaked.

WILL THE LM317 or the Smallbear solution on the Fuzz-A-tort work for me?

Please help, I really need a simple schematic of a 1.5V regulator or a -1.5V regulator to do the job.

Thanks,
Doron

[R.G.]

See: http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm337l.pdf

The LM337L is the positive-ground (i.e. negative power supply voltage) version of the LM317L. It provides a tight, quiet, regulated negative voltage. You can use a charge pump to make minus-voltages from positive voltages, then use the LM337 to regulate it to as low as 1.25V.  Note carefully that the LM337 does not have the same pinout as the LM317.