Does Tonepad ever.....???

[Canucker]

edit or do corrections on the pdf layouts/designs they have posted?

I built the EA Tremolo last night and it kinda worked and then I had the brainstorm of looking at the comment section of that build and a few said that Q1 and Q3 are to be switched to get it working properly....those comments were so long ago that I wondered if anything was done to modify the layout already.....it just came to mind because of all of the troubles I had building the Pulsar Tremolo off of that site a while back.

[Govmnt_Lacky]

Short answer would be NO.

Long answer is that Francisco is probably happy to go along and sell his pre-fabbed boards as is. I dont believe there has been a new project or update to a project on his site in about 4 years. That should tell you something. 

I have only ever purchased 2 boards from him (long... long ago. Beofre the days of etching) and both of them were flawed in some way. Missing traces on both.

[Mark Hammer]

There are folks here with very busy professional lives quite apart from their interest in pedals.  Some get to keep their fingers in it, and some get drawn in other directions.  Francisco Pena is an architect, from my discussions with him a few years ago.  I would think that he has moved along enough in his professional career arc that he doesn't have quite so much time to devote to layouts and accompanying documents now as he might have had 10 years ago.  Paul "gaussmarkov" is another.  By day he is an economics prof of some prestige.  Jake Nagy, whom some of us may know for the Supa Nova, Blue Magic, and a bunch of JFET-based designs that made us rush out and buy J201s, had a very productive period, finished his graduate degree and practicuum, and established a clinical psychology practice on Long Island somewhere, and we haven't heard from him since.  (If you're out there, Jake, hi!)

It can happen that a brief period where folks invest themselves heavily in FX design, or related activities, can create the impression that this is pretty much all they do.  We just have to accept that folks can have busy lives that divide them up amongst many obligations, and sometimes they just have to say goodbye to us and let their last efforts fester.

[Canucker]

I guess a lot of work went into it initially and then it just took on a life of its own. I built my Rat and Smallclone from there with no issues and they are possibly my two faves that I've put together.

[GGBB]

I've e-mailed them a couple of times over the past couple of years to tell them about missing or corrupt project files, but never got any responses and the files have never been fixed.

[xixiviii]

I have completed around nine of the tonepad projects to date, I found the same thing with the EA Tremolo as the original poster, but I had made it a habit to read through all of the build reports first - just in case.  I knew starting the build that I would need to modify a bit.

For the ones I have done from there, the PCBs were laid out correctly and the BOM was accurate.

Build reports are pretty valuable though, especially somewhere like tonepad where life has seemingly moved on to bigger and better things for the site creators.

[Mark Hammer]

Before I create a mistaken impression, let me say I don't think the Tonepad site has been abandoned.  Rather, as those folks here, diligent enough to have produced layouts and build documents can attest, it takes a lot of time, dedication, and single-mindedness to produce those things.  And if you're short on time, updating them tends not to rise to the top of the stack of things to do.

[Canucker]

yeah I didn't meant to bash any ones efforts. I just wasn't sure if things were updated following build reports making it unnecessary to check those before starting a project or not... some projects I research a lot before starting and sometimes I have a few projects on the go and just jump right in...but thats usually for simple stuff like a boost or two.