REMINDER TO ALL MORONS LIKE ME

[downweverything]

reminder to all morons like me:  double check and triple check your transistor pinouts.  ive been staring at my acoustic 360 clone in awe for the last two days wondering why i was getting no output.      
i swear i checked them.. guess i changed tran type before ordering parts.
i feel so stupid.  somebody please cheer me up.

[javacody]

Maybe this will cheer you up, I recently used a 1k pot when I should have been using a 1M pot. It was as a bass pot in a tone stack. Can you say "no bass"?  

[smoguzbenjamin]

I've been kicking myself since I began because I always screw up transistor pinouts

[Peter Snowberg]

Don't feel too bad. It happens to all of us.

Not to have a competition.... but here's a bad one... I did a layout for some controllers a while back and discovered that I flipped a chip after getting $700 worth of circuit boards made. It was surface mount too just to add insult to injury.

Cheer up and remember that when you can't laugh any more, it just isn't funny.

-Peter

[zener]

Before, I use to make mistakes with pots, especially when looking into the schematics. There were some times that I set the volume pot at full before wiring it and heard nothing. I thought the that there's somthig wrong with resistors' values, polarized caps and IC pinouts only to found out later that I'm looking in the wrong side of the pot. I had inverted the 1 & 3 lug.

It's very similar to yours, since a pot has three legs/pins also.

Even the best electronics gurus made a lot of mistakes before.

Mistake is a part of life :roll: , no matter how simple or complex it is.

Cheers.

Zener

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

"The man who has never made a mistake, has probably never made anything."
-Reader's Digest, 1957 (probably).

[petemoore]

I'm tempted to video tape all building of ckts.
 But I don't even know if I could trust the camera...
 I swear if you turn your back these components move their own connections...especially those pesky Jfet transistore and their pinouts!!!

[RDV]

I can never get right which way to look at a pot to determine which pins are which. I know its in the DIY FAQ, but I still get it wrong. I keep a printout of pinouts handy at all times though.

Regards

RDV

[Bill_F]

I remember getting done with a circuit, firing it up and nothing. After freaking out for awhile I noticed I didn't even have the tranny's in the sockets at all. I've also done the same exact thing and noticed I hadn't put the IC in the socket. OR... when I've plugged the guitar into the out jack. Sheessssh...  :oops:

[smoguzbenjamin]

When I first started playing guitar (about 3 years ago) there was a squier strat at school and I plugged it into the headphone output of the amp I panicked, thinking I broke the amp and went to my next lesson quietly :mrgreen: I was amazed to see the amp work the next day, lol

[WGTP]

I sawed a 16 pin op amp socket in have for 8 pins.  One was coming loose so I super glued it.  Now the op amp won't go in to it.  Had to cut it open.

[MarkB]

we've all been there...
so now the real question is - how does the 360 sound?!
"-)

[downweverything]

yeah i wish i knew how it sounds.  i made the boards for transistors with pinouts ebc.  the 3391s i ordered are ecb and i dont have enough to redo the board.  i tried reusing the ones but the leads werent long enough to cross the base and collector because i had already trimmed them.  i think im just going to order some 2n5210s.  well see if it works then.

[Mark Hammer]

Stuff happens....and the confusing diagrams often accompanying datasheets frequently doesn't help to make it happen any less.

If men forgot important anniversary dates with their wives/girlfriends ONLY as many times as they got transistor pinouts mixed up, the world would be a far better place.
:wink:

[D Wagner]

I remember getting done with a circuit, firing it up and nothing. After freaking out for awhile I noticed I didn't even have the tranny's in the sockets at all. I've also done the same exact thing and noticed I hadn't put the IC in the socket. OR... when I've plugged the guitar into the out jack. Sheessssh...  :oops:

I did this with a tube screamer.  I checked my in and out connections and the battery leads...then I checked to see if my pinouts were correct.  Duh!  I didn't even have the transistors or opamp installed!   :oops:

I also did two Si FF's at the same time.  Neither worked.  So checking the pinouts for the 10th or 12th time revealed that I was viewing the pins from the bottom, the diagram was showing them from the top.  I was 100% sure that I had the pin orientation correct, so I wasted a lot of time checking everything else.  Then, I put in a known tranny, and it worked.  I rechecked the others, and they were in 180 degrees off.  

The moral of this story is that when you are sure that your transistors are in correctly, but the circuit doesn't work, verify the pinouts.

I now have a diagram for all of my usual transistors or FETs posted by my workbench.  It has a 3-D depiction of the transistor, and the schematic symbol, both with C B E or D S G marked on the legs (Actually they're in storage now, but it will be on my workbench, again soon.)

Cheer up downwitheverything, you'll make the same mistake again in the future.  Next time, you'll know exactly what to look for.  

Derek

[Ge_Whiz]

Built the Blue Magic. Managed to not only get the pinouts of the MOSFET wrong, but also accidentally bypassed the whole device, feeding the input into the second stage. Result? A distortion unit that reduced the signal level, and didn't distort. Now THAT took some debugging!

We've all been there, and at least most trannies are dirt cheap. Try building a Wien Bridge oscillator with a £16 ($25) thermistor regulator, and watching it briefly light up like a light bulb when you switch on...  :lol:

[BillyJ]

Peter that is a sucky story. I am sorry about that. I couldn't even imagine that much money going down the tubes...ouch.

Well I feel a lot less pissed about that board I didn't reverse last week I tell ya.