Tell us your foot switch feature requests!

[Fancy Lime]

Hi there,

there has been a lot of discussion on this forum about non-true bypass switching. I would like to have a PCB that takes care of the most common foot switching needs. To make that useful to many people, I'd like to know what you guys want from something like that.

My requirements so far:

- Temporary foot switch (more durable than latching)
- Option for remote control
- Status LEDs for both switching statuses (for channel switching)
- 9-18V operation
- No out of production or hard to get parts
EDIT:
- Must work as a dro in replacement for true bypass (i.e. buffer is included in the switching board)

My nice-to-have's:
- Integrated power supply filtering


Let me know what you guys want!

Cheers,
Andy

[iainpunk]

this could be a great product.

the thing i miss most in pedals is next to a latching switch, i´d like to see the possibility to invert the state of the bypass temporarily, so when i have for example, a fuzz engaged, i can press the other footswitch to stutter between fuzz and clean and when its disengaged i can do bursts of fuzz...

i already have that in true bypass form, but i prefer buffered bypass because i use a passive octave pedal which needs a buffered pedal in front of it.

[Fancy Lime]

this could be a great product.

the thing i miss most in pedals is next to a latching switch, i´d like to see the possibility to invert the state of the bypass temporarily, so when i have for example, a fuzz engaged, i can press the other footswitch to stutter between fuzz and clean and when its disengaged i can do bursts of fuzz...

i already have that in true bypass form, but i prefer buffered bypass because i use a passive octave pedal which needs a buffered pedal in front of it.

Hi iainpunk,

interesting proposal. I think I found a way to have an additional momentary inverter switch. It would even be possible with the same method to have instead of two footswitches just one footswitch and an additional 3-way toggle switch, which switches the behavior of the footswitch between 1) latching on/off, 2) normally off, temporarily on, 3) normally on, temporarily off. I hope I'll find the time sometime today to draw it.

Everyone else is happy with their switches?

Cheers,
Andy

[patrick398]

Everyone else is happy with their switches?

Cheers,
Andy

I much prefer the idea of a momentary bypass switch but the increased price of implementing opto or flip flop methods has always put me off.
My main problem with tb bypass is switch pop. Either i'm noticing it more these days or i've had a dodgy batch of switches but silent switching is becoming very appealing. I don't like the temporary muting method though.
From what i understand, switch pop is a possibility with pretty much every bypass switching arrangement.

[amptramp]

I did have a silent switching arrangement here:

https://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=120006.msg1122270#msg1122270

that does not depend on muting.

[anotherjim]

My experience of momentary push switches is that they wear out quicker! Every time someone operates it and the expected doesn't happen, they just push it harder instead of stopping to see what was really wrong.

[ElectricDruid]

Another +1 for the momentary switches from me. I hate the feeling of true bypass switches and the awful KERRR-LUNK! noise they make. Doesn't matter if it comes through on the audio or not - it's loud enough to hear acoustically!

I also like the fact that you can do both toggle on/off on a short press and temporarily on on a longer press with a momentary foot switch. That's a nice feature that a true bypass can't do. (Stick that on the feature list!)

For years when I was young "silent switching" was the holy grail of pedals. When I was a teenager, we all wondered how Boss had done it, and we didn't know because we didn't have internet to go and look it up! Years later, fashions change and suddenly everyone seems to want bulky, unreliable, noisy, and expensive 3PDT switches on everything. At least they're simple to use. The demand for that seems mostly to have been driven by badly designed soft-switching pedals that had hopeless input impedances and dodgy buffer designs. But the solution to that is to design them better, not to chuck them out in favour of something else with its own problems.

Going back to the OP's original question, it might be useful if it was possible to chain these boards somehow, so that you could wire several up as a sequential switch (so press=1 on 2+3 off, another press=2 on 1+3 off, another press=3 on 1+2 off, another press=1 on again 2+3 off) or with just two so that you could do an A-or-B selection (press = 1on, 2 off, press again = 1 off, 2 on). How that'd be done I can't work out, but if you've got a board that can turn one in/out pari on or off silently, it'd be nice to be able to link them together to be able to do more sophisticated things. I suppose if it has a remote input, you can always do the logic somewhere else and add it on, but then that's more parts.

[Fancy Lime]

Everyone else is happy with their switches?

Cheers,
Andy

I much prefer the idea of a momentary bypass switch but the increased price of implementing opto or flip flop methods has always put me off.
My main problem with tb bypass is switch pop. Either i'm noticing it more these days or i've had a dodgy batch of switches but silent switching is becoming very appealing. I don't like the temporary muting method though.
From what i understand, switch pop is a possibility with pretty much every bypass switching arrangement.

That is just mostly a matter of what you use for the actual switches in the signal path. I would prefer "the boss way" with JFETs precisely because that is silent and it is easy to design into an existing effect. Other schemes that allow silent switches with CD4066 or CD4053 are more elaborate than what I want to do here. Also, the price of all the parts including the momentary footswitch will probably come out below the price of a 3PDT or at least not much over.

My experience of momentary push switches is that they wear out quicker! Every time someone operates it and the expected doesn't happen, they just push it harder instead of stopping to see what was really wrong.

The beauty of this system, at least to me, is that you can build the actual activator of the momentary switch anyway you like. I have never actually SEEN a boss pedal run over by a tank, but...

Another +1 for the momentary switches from me. I hate the feeling of true bypass switches and the awful KERRR-LUNK! noise they make. Doesn't matter if it comes through on the audio or not - it's loud enough to hear acoustically!

I also like the fact that you can do both toggle on/off on a short press and temporarily on on a longer press with a momentary foot switch. That's a nice feature that a true bypass can't do. (Stick that on the feature list!)

Hmm, that would indeed be nice but difficult to implement without microcontrollers (aha!). Have to think about that one for a bit.

For years when I was young "silent switching" was the holy grail of pedals. When I was a teenager, we all wondered how Boss had done it, and we didn't know because we didn't have internet to go and look it up! Years later, fashions change and suddenly everyone seems to want bulky, unreliable, noisy, and expensive 3PDT switches on everything. At least they're simple to use. The demand for that seems mostly to have been driven by badly designed soft-switching pedals that had hopeless input impedances and dodgy buffer designs. But the solution to that is to design them better, not to chuck them out in favour of something else with its own problems.

Going back to the OP's original question, it might be useful if it was possible to chain these boards somehow, so that you could wire several up as a sequential switch (so press=1 on 2+3 off, another press=2 on 1+3 off, another press=3 on 1+2 off, another press=1 on again 2+3 off) or with just two so that you could do an A-or-B selection (press = 1on, 2 off, press again = 1 off, 2 on). How that'd be done I can't work out, but if you've got a board that can turn one in/out pari on or off silently, it'd be nice to be able to link them together to be able to do more sophisticated things. I suppose if it has a remote input, you can always do the logic somewhere else and add it on, but then that's more parts.

A/B selection is part of my design in progress anyway. Sequential switching would be fairly easy to implement with a CD4024 ripple counter (including a reset switch), but that would be a different board. It's just counting to infinity in binary. However, the way I think of doing the board at the moment, sequential switching would be almost as easy to implement by linking the flipflops with a high pass (that turns the "square wave" of the switching signal into spikes when the transition occurs) and a full-wave rectifier (so that every spile is counted, not only the positive or only the negative ones), which then trigger the remote input. Totally doable but would need a "linker board" to connect the individual switching boards. This starts being fun 

Andy

[amptramp]

I have a 3DPT on a stompbox I made.  When you push down on the switch, you first feel the graunch of unlubricated metal-on-metal sliding content followed by an uncertain click to the other position then once again, the graunch of unlubricated metal when the switch is released.  I presume I might be able to get a few hundred actuations out of it before it finally dies.

If you design with a 3PDT, you do not know which pole will connect or disconnect first, so you can get circuit noise that is unpredictable.  And you can get production black death - a switch that was tested and qualified as good will have a subtle change during production and the order of switching may change and the change will introduce switch pops where there were none originally.

I was in a music store where there was a stompbox (going for CDN $420) where the action felt smooth, the transition was certain and it felt like it would last forever.  Hobbyists cannot get these switches.  We get craptastic Chinese junk switches.

There are a number of SPST switches that are much better and cheaper and there is no switching order problem - the circuitry takes care of that.

[Ben N]

Multifunction switching, like VFE pedals, and yeah, that is done with a microcontroller--so what? That opens up so many possibilities, including tap tempo where applicable.
MIDI (although I guess remote switchability is in effect the same thing in a bypass switch).

[Rixen]

I have hardware and firmware design for a multi mode switch for two effects loops. The mode is programmable by a resistor/voltage on a pin, actuation was by means of a non contact Hall effect switch, LED outputs, latching relay outputs and uses an ATTiny microcontroller.

The modes are (by failing memory) Bypass----Loop A + Loop B----Bypass
Bypass----Loop A----Loop B-----Bypass
Bypass----Loop A----Bypass----Loop B----Bypass
Bypass----Loop A----Loop B (momentary)----Loop A  (short tap to release back to bypass)
Bypass----Loop A----Loop A + Loop B (momentary)----Loop A  (short tap to release back to bypass)

...or something like that. I'll dig up the code and schematic...

[patrick398]

I've just been playing around in Eagle trying to make a PCB for R.G's 4053 bypass and as such i'd like to add another foot switch request which is low part count/small pcb size. Seems that with two large ICs it's going to take up a lot of valuable enclosure real estate. I was trying to keep it down to around 55x25mm so that it could be placed against the bottom wall of a 1590B but that seems basically impossible.
An option would be to include it all on the main PCB but again, with more complicated boards, the space it takes up makes it tricky.