Digitech Ricochet Footswitch Fix

[moid]

Hello everyone, it's nice to be back!

Just for a change I thought I'd post a fix I discovered in case anyone ever has to deal with the issue in the future. A friend of mine asked me if I could look at his Ricochet pedal, he said most of the time when he pressed the footswitch it failed to engage. I said hopefully the switch was just worn out and I could replace it with a new one. I've never used one of these before, and it was a total pain in the arse to open (and put back together). There are two PCBs inside connected with a lot of metal pins (thankfully they survived me rocking the shell back and forth a bit to get the two halves apart) the pedal is made of steel I think, much thinner than aluminium stompboxes, but very rigid and you need to flex the damn thing to pop the jack sockets out to get inside (and then also wiggle the two PCBs apart). I seriously hope I never open one of these again. Oh yes and the pedal requires an imperial measurement allen key to open! I'm glad I bought a dual metric/imperial set of allen keys 25 years ago, but this is the first time I've needed to touch the imperial side! I'm surprised - I know Digitech is /was American, but do the Americans still design things in imperial measurements? I would've thought that any kind of engineering these days would be in millimeters... anyway, back to the plot:

Inside is obviously just loads of SMD stuff, but a switch is a switch, right? I flipped the PCB over and discovered there's no solder connecting the footswitch to the PCB! It appears to be a push fit plastic design that snaps into holes in the PCB... so I was really worried about pushing this out in case it damaged the PCB underneath, but with gentle persuasion it did pop off and revealed that it is totally mechanical and there is no electrical connection with the PCB at all... which did indeed confuse me because I assumed this would be a momentary SPST footswitch. It turns out the footswitch has a rubber faced metal plunger inside it that descends when the switch is stomped on and that connects with a simple button switch on the PCB and 'just' touches it and triggers the effect.  Which is cool until the pedal has been used a few thousand times and the rubber facing on the plunger starts to abrade away and the plunger only connects with the button switch if you hammer it down hard and straight (as the actress said to the bishop). So I thought OK, I'll buy a new switch and replace it. Easy enough... except the Ricochet contains a custom switch made only for Digitech and you can't buy them...


In the above picture the switch is detached from the PCB and upside down so you can see inside the housing and the rubber plunger. The button switch is on the PCB just beneath the switch

So plan B... how to make the plunger connect with the button switch? I went low tech, and made a plastic cage out of vero board offcuts and superglue (see picture)




that fitted snuggly inside the housing of the switch (turned upside down from the orientation in the above image obviously)




and reduced the gap between the plunger and the button switch... and amazingly, it works! You don't have to stomp very hard to trigger the effect now (the plunger has lost about 2-3mm of travel due to the thickness of the vero), but it works happily! I built the cage with the metal strips of the vero board on the inside, just in case there was a connection with anything metallic on the PCB. Might be overkill on the worry side, but I often find that if I allow things to potentially go wrong, they have a habit of doing so...


(here is the switch push fitted back onto the PCB with the plastic cage safely contained inside the switch housing)


So I hope this helps someone in the future Anyway it's nice to be here again, I've got another week of work and then I can take my Summer holiday and start posting effects pedals that will no doubt not work in some way. I hope you've had a good year, I'm going to start looking back through posts to see what I've missed since last year.

[PRR]

> do the Americans still design things in imperial measurements?

Perhaps ask: do I have a metric Allen wrench?

I do, only because I grab 3-in-1 packs and one of them may be metric. But you know I am weird.

Another question: can I buy metric Allens? If I need just one small Allen, locally, I may have no choice. The industrial screw shop on the highway will, but setting up an account is way too much for one screw

Yes, small boxes of Allens are easy on Amazon, eBay, and AsianExpress.

Another question: WTF use an Allen? There are places it is the best solution, but IMHO a stage pedal should come apart with a good pocket knife. Straight or maybe Phillips/cross, not hex. (A Victorinox Executive will remove a few not-tiny Allens.)

[moid]

> do the Americans still design things in imperial measurements?

Perhaps ask: do I have a metric Allen wrench?

I do, only because I grab 3-in-1 packs and one of them may be metric. But you know I am weird.

Another question: can I buy metric Allens? If I need just one small Allen, locally, I may have no choice. The industrial screw shop on the highway will, but setting up an account is way too much for one screw

Yes, small boxes of Allens are easy on Amazon, eBay, and AsianExpress.

Another question: WTF use an Allen? There are places it is the best solution, but IMHO a stage pedal should come apart with a good pocket knife. Straight or maybe Phillips/cross, not hex. (A Victorinox Executive will remove a few not-tiny Allens.)

I see your point indeed, but I don't think this is a pedal that much could be fixed with if it went wrong (unless it was the footswitch, the jack sockets, maybe the pots?). Everything else is basically tiny computers and SMD parts... so I can see why they didn't bother to make it user friendly to open. It doesn't take batteries so there's no need for the average guitar player to open one. The allen screws are there (I guess) because the steel housing is too thin for machine head screws like we would use in an aluminium stompbox. Maybe the steel housing is cheaper than an aluminimium one, and that's why they chose that design? I do have a pedal in that same series - the Freq Out - and it too is held together by allen screws, I would imagine the contents of that are a bunch of CPUs and are probably not fixable. I prefer boxes that can be opened with a screwdriver / easily!