Effectiveness in your building process. Here's how.

[feddozz]

Hi all

I wanted to share this idea. I am not sure it has been done already. I'll start with some background.

Background

From my limited experience I have a clear opinion of what I like and not for my building process. I like vero because the board can be made in minutes including cuts and links. After that I am ready to solder. When it comes to pots connections things start to hurt. Especially because vero layouts usually have pots connections all over the place: i.e. lug 1 one one side and lug 2 and 3 on the other. If the build includes 3 or 4 pots or even 5 like the one I am presenting here, you can end up with a viper's nest. Pots tied up in knots and difficulties with boxing up the build.

To overcome this I tried with a previous built to use perf layouts that caters for board mount pots. Fantastic, apart from the fact that the circuit was the britannia and the number of components is so high, I spent hours and hours and...I mean hours to bend and cut all those components legs.

I know the solution to all this is an etched perf board with on board pots. Whoever etches his boards will most likely not be interested in this, but I hope I'll get some valuable advice from more exprerience people. I am not planning to build lots of pedals, I should buy a drill column, acids and all that. I think etching is not for everybody and certainly not for me, at this time.

The solution

My next build is going to be the Lunar module deluxe with all the 5 pots. I though I wanted to use the vero which is quick but I could not wire all those pot connections. I mean I could, but I wanted to find a more efficient way. Also I am using a millennium bypass which means even more cables to deal with.

My goal would be to put everything on board, and I mean everything (jacks, dc socket, foot switch), without having to etch a dedicated board. I saw a board some time ago which someone was selling and allowed exactly that. That was a fabbed board and it will come at a cost, although I do not know its cost, I cannot find that thread  anymore.

Anyhow, at the moment I devised a way of sticking pots on a vero board and have as few wire connections as possible. The majority of them are made with links, which look more efficient to me because they do not need to be stripped and cut to length prior to soldering, and do not take much space in the enclosure, opposite to cables. The remaining ones will be made with jumpers across the board, so again, neater than flying cables between pots and board.

I would like to share this, see what people think and maybe get some suggestions on how to make this even more efficient.

The idea is to extend the vero and allow more rows to mount the pots on the board. Obviously it depends on the size of the initial vero layout and your target enclosure.

So here's my starting point: vero layout of the Skreddy LMD:



I extended the board for the millennium bypass 2.



And then made the connections:



The original lines that represent cables are there only to show where things go. The black lines are links, The red lines are jumpers. The red squares are cuts on the strips. The numbers in the circles are pot lugs. Pots are going to be installed on the solder side.

You can use right angle pots but I am planning to use

pcb mount pots .

I have a method for that without using cables. I will add pics later. Basically, I bend the lug 90 degrees towards the bottom of the pot and solder a component leg. That is because right angle pots are not available for all values (and cost more). If I have no space like with volume 1 i will use something like the wire wrapping technique on the component side of the board.

A view of the board in the box



I would like to know what people think about it.

Thanks for reading this long explanation.

[PRR]

Whether you on-board jacks/pots or not, I _DO_ think it a good idea to use the board to organize. That's part of its job. Don't have P1a P1b P1c for one pot coming out three sides of the board. Pick the best place (usually all on one or two edges) for the pot or pot-wires. Just as you have done in your picture #3. Use layout or jumpers to bring circuit nodes to jack/pot points.

[blackieNYC]

I like the method, but it's not for me. I'm usually making things as small as possible (a New York real estate necessity). I put pot and switch wires wherever my very tight layout allows. But you gotta be on it. I have miles of color coded Telco cable, as I wire, I write on my schematic : "Bk,Wht, R" going from R6 to the wiper of the shzat pot.

[MrStab]

thanks for sharing, Vince! i like to read about how other people approach this topic.

even when i go back to experimenting with stripboard (i'm lazy and use PCBs now), i'll try to use board-mounted pots wherever possible and keep all wires coming off one side, with the exception of LEDs sometimes.

be it proto board, point-to-point or PCBs, i think it's important to ask yourself:

"what if i have to fix this later? can i handle that degree of self-loathing?"

keeping as much on the board as possible is so much faster, so much easier to assemble, so much more intuitive than having resistors stuck to switches etc., so much easier to keep track of errors (and fewer possible), offers more support options for the board, allows you to tailor to the enclosure and is often so much better at keeping signals where you want em (e.g. your puny unbuffered guitar signal doesn't have to cross a motorway of pot wiring).

i'm no expert by any stretch. i'm actually kinda stupid. but when the means are available, it really bugs me to see stripboard or perfboard (or even PCB) layouts with little regard for practical assembly or maintenance/tweaking. loads of people are fine with it so maybe i'm just being a narc.

in a similar vein, i think the use of JFETs and CMOS switches for bypassing gets plenty of attention, but it's mentioned a bit less for switching parameters within effects. Relevant because it lets you eliminate loads of wiring whilst avoiding crosstalk/feedback. FETs & chips like the 4053/4066 can use fewer discrete parts if used mid-circuit than they'd need if used for bypass, if AC coupling isn't needed, the 1/2-supply biasing is already taken care of and a nanoscopic "click" can be tolerated.

[Jdansti]

Great idea. Have you seen these strip boards that have places for jacks, pots, and switches?  It's run by one of the guys on the forum.

http://www.maker.ie/store/c5/GUITAR_PEDAL.html

[feddozz]

Great idea. Have you seen these strip boards that have places for jacks, pots, and switches?  It's run by one of the guys on the forum.

http://www.maker.ie/store/c5/GUITAR_PEDAL.html

That's the pcb i was refering to above. Thanks for the link!

[duck_arse]

oh, I see now that you have allowed two rows at the bottom, and staggered the pot pins so there is no fighting over the hole space. I was going to suggest doing so at the top.

in which case - carry on.

[feddozz]

oh, I see now that you have allowed two rows at the bottom, and staggered the pot pins so there is no fighting over the hole space. I was going to suggest doing so at the top.

in which case - carry on.

I changed it a bit and reduced a link and a cut by putting fuzz 3 up a row,in fact fuzz1 together with pregain 1 they both go to ground. Also the LED is going to be in the right position. I will post it when it's finalised.

Thanks everybody for the answers. I have no time at the moment to reply to everyone. I'll catch up soon, I hope.

[ElectricDruid]

I did something like this on a build of a load of Big Muff fuzz clones. The pots were mounted on the edge of a piece of stripboard, with a few associated components. The downside of such a plan is that then the stripboard is vertical. I kept the vertical piece short so it would fit in a standard Hammond enclosure. The rest of the components were mounted on another stripboard at 90 degrees to the first, parallel with the bottom of the enclosure. The two boards had the connections between them made with soldered wires where necessary plus a few extras for good measure. I didn't use any mechanical reinforcement, but despite that, none have failed yet (ten years so far).

There are certainly ways and means to minimise offboard wiring and messing about with just stripboard/veroboard layouts.

Tom

[feddozz]

Hello

Here's an update on this topic. I finished the board and would like to show some pics to make the method a bit more clear. This is the final version I used for this board



You can see below the pots with soldered legs are being positioned on the board with no soldering just to ensure I got my measurements right (always verify). I will not repeat this step anymore because now I now what is the minimum hole distance between 2 pots.

Then you can see the completed board and with soldered pots and on board jumpers. You might notice that a couple of jumpers are wrapped and soldered to the pot legs on the component size.

I am very satisfied with this because I avoided stripping and soldering about 15 wires to the board. I included a millennium bypass too. the LED (not shown) is soldered directly to the board and reaches the bezel directly above it (as we have seen many a times).

One of the disadvantages of this method is that once the pots are soldered is difficult to access the soldered side of the board. I am thinking to use socketed pots for the next board to allow easy removal. More on this, later.

P.S. I have the links for my pics but can't see them from work, when they are hosted by postimg. So I can't verify they appear correctly. I will check later from home.

[duck_arse]

your blank board image shows, but none of the others. they are missing the ".jpg" from their links, which appear to be page url's rather than image url's.

[feddozz]

Pics should work now

[VidSicious]

I've done something similar to this before but not vero board mounted pots. I've put together 3 circuits together  (fuzz face going into klon buffer and then an ehx lpb1 boost om a separate footswitch) all on one board with links for power, input and output between them. It worked really well but it can get confusing very quickly unless you have actually drawn it out for reference. And due to small difference in sizes of the layouts, I was left with space for standoffs on the board.
I am intrigued by your idea as I have thought about such things lately a lot. It just seems more reliable to have external components PC mounted instead of using double sided tape or whatever. I've built some vero based stomps with 8 pots and switches and holy crap is it a pain in the ass to deal with all the pot wiring... I wish it was all as easy as PCB mounted pots. I just wish it was a standard on vero layouts...

[feddozz]

finished pedal here