The Psychotenuse Tremolo... reverse sawtooth tremolo with very few parts

[Ben N]

Interesting thread (fred?), but you two (twose?) should get a room  .

[duck_arse]

".... youse two ...."

[moid]

talking racoons? the possums are quite interested now. they didn't much care for the talking monkeys.



yes. like that.

Ahhh they are cute little fur balls! Are they pets, or just visiting your window sill? I can raise you a photo of a guilty badger trying to look innocent..."what me stick my nose in the plant trough and make a mess of it? Noooo that was another badger, you don't know him, he lives in another garden..."



Thanks for confirming the resistor change.

Love the Racoon skit, very funny! LOL

I aim to please Thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'll be here all week - remember to tip your waitress on the way out!

Interesting thread (fred?), but you two (twose?) should get a room  .

The twee of us? Tway mayhap? the tweedledee?

".... youse two ...."

"Just the two of us
We can make it if we tryyyyy"

and on that slightly discordant falsetto (sorry about that, tight trousers you know?) I have had a chance to make a new picture for your visual delight and general tantaslisation!



Sorry it's a big image - you might have to right click and choose display in another tab / open image in another tab to see it in all its glory (I tried making it smaller, but I always worry that other people have bad eyes like me, and I couldn't read the text when it was smaller, so I embiggened it for you all). Your optician may not thank me, but your wallet will!

Would someone mind checking a few parts of the vero side please? I think most of it is correct, however I'm a little unsure if the parts where audio goes in or out from the audio jacks connects with the footswitch (3PDT) correctly, and also I'm not sure if the ground cables from the audio jacks to the veroboard are right because they are setup very differently to the way I've done them on every other effects pedal I've ever made, but they work that way on the breadboard... thanks for any thoughts.

[duck_arse]

that badger reminds me of a joke.

I looked at yer dia, moidy, and you have too many black wires on the jack sleeves. you only need a single wire to each of the jacks sleeve lugs, trailing back to the board and commoning with a ground connection to your optical divider affair. you shouldn't need any ground/common between the oscillating/flashing section and the jacks/ldr section, as far as I can see.

as for that three pole switch wiring, well, it doesn't appear on your circuit diagram, so even though I think it is wrong, I don't know what it should or would look like right.


the possums are wild, but very tame, come each night [one after the other] for CARROT and banana and apple.

[moid]

Well the badgers have upset my mother in law and have dug quite a sett under her shed... so they are not in her good books! (they've made quite an excavation in her lawn). I have had words with them, but I'm not sure if they are taking me seriously (does anyone?). Anyways, I finally have some days off work so got to interpreting your advice and came up with the below visual creation:

One black wire for each audio jack, conecting together in common - I was able to move a few jumpers around once I'd got rid of those two extra wires, and the audio input of the board now goes to a different place, but I think this will work better.

I had a moment of inspiration and it occurred to me that where those black wires leave the board - if instead of dividing and going to each audio jack, they were one wire that went to lug 3 of a 10K pot, and then lug two had tow black cables going to the ground of each audio jack, would that allow me to have a blend control? (I can connect lug 2 and 1 together to keep things neat).

Thanks for the advice and sorry for the slow progress / replies - hopefully I can start building this over the next few days.

[duck_arse]

well now there's something screwy going on at imgur, as I can't get that image to open in a new tab, or save as. either that, or you've posted a mega huge image and it's too long loading, but a prof like you wouldn't. would?

about yer black wires mix pot - no. the/those black wires are the ground connections. they always remain ground, nothing happens there, we leave them alone except in as far as we connect them all together.

I also don't think you have added the 3 pole swith to your circuit diagram, so again, no comment.

[PRR]

well now there's something screwy going on at imgur, as I can't get that image to open in a new tab

Working for me, now. Still not for you? https://i.imgur.com/pOWqt7v.png

It is 3400x1400 pixels, which seems extravagant. Here's a down-size, does that render better?

[duck_arse]

3k4 x 1k4 ? will not load. the link follows, the load wheel shows complete - there is nowt but blank to look at. no traffic on the meter, nothing missing in the script blocker, so seems not a slow load. postimg img shows ok.

[moid]

well now there's something screwy going on at imgur, as I can't get that image to open in a new tab, or save as. either that, or you've posted a mega huge image and it's too long loading, but a prof like you wouldn't. would?

about yer black wires mix pot - no. the/those black wires are the ground connections. they always remain ground, nothing happens there, we leave them alone except in as far as we connect them all together.

I also don't think you have added the 3 pole swith to your circuit diagram, so again, no comment.

Sorry Duck, Imgur usually works - the link works fine on both windows PCs here, an iPad and an iPhone. Do you want me to stick it on my google drive and link from there? Hopefully the below link does that?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16B7rUKzpLufCteSKCdepQzZld23WwY4V/view?usp=sharing

PRR - thanks for making a smaller size one for Duck - I draw things large so I can see them (crap eyesight, even with varifocals ), I tend to forget that not everyone else has the visual sense of a blind mole rat...

OK thanks for warning about my brilliant idea with the mix pot... I wish the universe would keep up with my brilliant ideas and just work the way I think it should!

Your comment about my 3PDT switch; well that made my brain suddenly question whether I'd done that right and I thought maybe you were subtly hinting that I'd screwed that up too... so I spent some time  with the madbeans wiring PDF
https://www.madbeanpedals.com/tutorials/downloads/MBP_FootswitchWiring.pdf
in order to check things, and I've learned that switches work differently to how they did in my head, so that's always a good thing (no don't ask about how screwy they were in my head). So at least I feel confident about that I have no idea how to draw that in schematic form though because there will be cables criss crossing each other all over (this to me is one place where I find schematics really hard to understand and a wiring layout is much easier). Sorry, the brain is weak and sleepy (someone fiddled with our clocks last night and I've lost an hour of sleep and am even more confused than usual!)

So are my two black wires now ok? If so I'll start cutting the vero board for this and get on with assembling stuff!

[duck_arse]

moidy - too many wires. those black wires - instead of sticking two into one hole on the vero, put one above [ row J ] and one below [ row L ], because you have that link on the board.

the switch. I don't really understand, but - on the top right corner you have two green wires to the same lug. this is bound to end in disaster and shorts. not the flowery summer type shorts. from the right end of row I, remove that green wire. link it [ row I ] instead up to row F, one hole inside of the orange wire.

the image. I can't still get imgur to show anything on the imgur link. the blank page completes loading, is all I can say. both in Vivaldi and Seamonkey. Paul's image shows ok. your googoo linked ing works ok - but still doesn't show the switch, so I still don't have to look at it properly.

I thought maybe you were subtly hinting that I'd screwed that up ....

no sir, this doesn't sound like me at all.

[moid]

no sir, this doesn't sound like me at all.

Ahhh that's that strong 'straaaalian accent you've got there mate! It foxes me every time It must've been the possums I heard chuckling in the background... probably found some nice carrot.

Sadly, it is somewhat well founded though - so I built the circuit (yay!) I plugged it in....(sharp intake of breath from the onlookers)... and it don't work (nay!, loud exhalation from the crowd, cries of 'say it ain't so!' are heard). So the Red LEDs turn on, but don't flicker and the Blue LEDs do nothing. At first it occurred to me that I'd put the SCR in the wrong way around, so I desoldered it (normally I socket transistors but the legs on these bad boys are too fat for sockets), added a socket and filed the legs of a new SCR down so they would squeeze into a socket, but no joy. As I get the legs positioned into the socket the LEDs will flicker (but only red or blue, neither at the same time, and it's only for a short period of time before I get the SCR legs into the socket properly - from there on only the red LEDS stay on. I did try turning the SCR 180 degrees to see if I %^&*ed the orientation up, but that just turns off all the LEDs, so I'm confident it is in the right way.

I noticed (while manhandling the circuit) that the first blue LED turns on faintly if I hold the anode leg of the second blue LED - it doesn't flicker, just turns on faintly, and the second blue LED stays off... if I let go of the anode the first blue LED turns off.

So I've busted out the multimeter

SCR C106D
Gate - 601mV
Anode - 0.652V
Cathode - 000.2mV

Also I measured the first blue LED (the one with the LDR attached to it)

Anode - 4.127V
Cathode 2.097V - this to me means it should light up!

Second blue LED

Anode 2.108V
Cathode 191mV - this looks really odd to me.

Pictures of course - I've put these on google drive and imgur, hopefully one of them works

Front
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tW6pRB5IeOGGbWB4T8nd_zuIB-0nV178/view?usp=sharing

[/img]

Back
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mr4dG4CVFGET3Nb7Rl7sT9nWGnvf7w34/view?usp=sharing

[/img]

if anyone has any good suggestions then I'm happy to hear them

[duck_arse]

you need to convince me that I can see that circled blue link on your board, and that I will see that cut when I look underside. because I don't think either is.

[moid]

Wow, thanks Duck! How many times have I stared at this??? Yep definitely missing both items... will try to look at this on Wednesday afternoon when I don't have any classes.

[moid]

Well scientific progress goes.... urghhh. I added the cut and the link, and still no joy. Red LED stays on constantly, blue is off. The weird thing is that if I take the C106D out of its socket and slightly / lightly brush it against the socket, both LEDS start flickering... but if I insert the C106D into the socket so it is held in place, the LEDS go back to Red on, Blue off. I have now also tried swearing at the circuit and threatening to give it a damn good thrashing, but it's no longer listening to me. Maybe I've invented the first circuit that works on breadboard but not on vero? It's about time I was first at something!

[moid]

OK I've redrawn the vero layout to reflect what is on the actual vero at the moment. I think the added cut now breaks things? I also think the screengrab you posted is from an older vero layout (or one I screwed up on, probably more likely that). I think the area around the LDRs is wrong, but I can't work out why... there's something odd about it, but why that would stop the LEDs flashing makes no sense to me.

[moid]

Okay so I am doing a continuity test between the adjoining strips on the back of the vero. I found continuity between strips 3 and 4 so I have knifed that and there is no more continuity there, but nothing has changed regarding the LEDs. The only other adjoining strips with continuity are ones that are linked together.

I had another thought. I went back to the circuit on breadboard and it had locked up and was doing the same LED effect as the vero. The only way to get that started was to wiggle the components, and then I found I had to take the C106D out, put it back into the breadboard and adjust the pot sweep and the circuit started up. The breadboard version doesn't have the 100K resistor on the pot on it, so there are parts of the sweep where it does nothing (except maybe cause the circuit to lock up), so I wonder if the 100K is too strong a resistor for the vero and I should either remove it or try somethig smaller? I might desolder one end of it and see what happens.

I just measured the resistance on the vero pot with the 100K resistor attached to it and it travels from 1ohm to 19.71K, which is less than the 21K I wanted...so is that due to % variance in the stated value of the pot or resistor and the calculation to turn a 25K pot into a 21K pot? Maybe it is time to switch out a 20K pot with no added resistor?

[moid]

OK so desoldering that 100K resistor did absolutely nothing

[duck_arse]

I also think the screengrab you posted is from an older vero layout (or one I screwed up on, probably more likely that).

well sir, one is both the same. I looked at your latest posted layout update, and it seems to me to match the one that I cut up and circled. so. back to you.

[moid]

Ermmmm can I plea stupidity? Well in the interests of science (and because I have no idea what else to do) I stuck the original BT169 transistor in the same sockets (after bending it's pins a lot to fit the pinout of the C106D) and now both red and blue LEDs stay on! And if I turn the pot, at a certain point they all flicker rapidly a few times and then remain steady on afterwards... does that mean anything to you? Maybe this is one to give up on - it has given me an idea for another pedal based on part of this one that might just work (I have parts of it on breadboard at the moment)

[duck_arse]

pleas pleas me.

I'm happy for you to draw a line. doesn't even need to be straight.