epoxy goop source in australia?

[The Tone God]

if you make the widget accessable and affordable, then it makes cloning less desirable as well.

I think the keeping of costs reasonable is one of the very good defences against theft. There would be little point in trying to duplicate a circuit if the potential for profit is not there. Using market factors to your advantage is far more effective IMHO then physical or legal means of protection.

A little off topic, you mentioned Krackers.  I really hate when hard working people in tough-to-make-it fields like music electronics get ripped off, so I had quite a little chuckle to myself at the outrage in the kracker community when a few companies took the Apple - Intel changeover as an opprotunity to upgrade their security to iLok dongle authorization... which has not been properly kracked yet.  BOY are they pissed!  And I had an even bigger chuckle at the hacker that wrote a boot sector virus disguised as an iLok crack...  i know, it is morbid, but karma and all that.

I dislike it as well when well deserved people in a field get ripped off as well. On the opposite end Vista's authorization scheme, that I'm sure they spent months on trying to improve, got broken within 32 minutes of product release. Not that I approve of such things but as a FreeBSD user it made me chuckle.

Oh I forgot something.  if you poke around other boards that have less scrupulous members, you can see how frustrating it is to them when a builder does something as simple as sanding the numbers off an opamp or discreet.  I mean, I would be hard pressed to tell if a sanded-off to-92 component was a BJT, mosfet (depl or enh), current source, voltage source or regulator.  The simple frustration of "what is THAT thing" has protected a few builders over the years.

Part identification abstraction is a fairly effective method of protection but once again it is not foolproof. In this example it was just the lack of knowledge on the offender's part that made it effective. I still wouldn't rely on this method.

I'll say it again for everyone in the cheap seats, if someone really wants your design they will get it. Live with it. Goop off.

Andrew

[The Tone God]

Maybe just put in one of those exploding dye packets like in bank money bags.

Tidbit for possible interest:

Some IC manufactures put a layer of reactive material directly on the IC's core that will react when exposed to air preventing circumvention of the ICs protection mechanisms. Same idea but with better results.

Andrew

[newbie builder]

if you make the widget accessable and affordable, then it makes cloning less desirable as well.

I think the keeping of costs reasonable is one of the very good defences against theft. There would be little point in trying to duplicate a circuit if the potential for profit is not there. Using market factors to your advantage is far more effective IMHO then physical or legal means of protection.

That's definitely one of the best ways- it's what Paul Cochrane (maker of Tim/Timmy pedals) uses. He charges extremely low prices for very well made pedals, but they aren't gooped. I haven't heard of anybody going into business selling clones though, because Paul is already so cheap they couldn't really undercut him- their only draw would be that with him there is currently a wait because of the demand.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

As a (microscale) manufacturer, the only time I would use goop is if I was trying to hide that I had copied someone else's effect, or else I had come up wiht something that was so amazing, I was sure a hundred other manufacturers were going to grab it.
Havn't gooped yet

[darron]

i would just having a small argument in my mind on this topic for and against. on a very positive note it would give me a really nice reassurance that the components were absolutely locked in place, that wires wouldn't get ripped out, and in tight squeezes, that nothing would short to say the audio jack if it ever came loose.

i still think that in most cases it wouldn't be worth 'gooping'. i think it's a cool idea though to take simple steps to hide the component side of your circuit such as mounting it to pcb-mount jacks with the face down so that you would have to de-solder it to take a look. maybe spray a bit of something that's flammable at soldering iron temperatures on the board!! haha... actually.. hmmm

at the moment i'm making circuits for friends and some famous musicians. i'm not selling them. one of the first things i do when i give it to them is unscrew it to put a battery in and show them my really cool designed surface-mount pcb (to the 3pdt switch) and they are impressed with just the traces side.

if you decide to goop, maybe consider putting in extra holes to simply solder a spare component lead in that goes no where to create some confusion. create traces that seem important or go nowhere. create some reverse-engineering havoc!

[alextheian-alex]

at the moment i'm making circuits for friends and some famous musicians. i'm not selling them. one of the first things i do when i give it to them is unscrew it to put a battery in and show them my really cool designed surface-mount pcb (to the 3pdt switch) and they are impressed with just the traces side.

Do you mean that you are using surface mount components?  If so... MAN I am going cross-eyed just thinking about soldering those.

[darron]

at the moment i'm making circuits for friends and some famous musicians. i'm not selling them. one of the first things i do when i give it to them is unscrew it to put a battery in and show them my really cool designed surface-mount pcb (to the 3pdt switch) and they are impressed with just the traces side.

Do you mean that you are using surface mount components?  If so... MAN I am going cross-eyed just thinking about soldering those.

no no... and no again. that could be a fun challenge though huh? i was just talking about how you can mount pcbs to pots, switches, and jacks instead of using spacers or having them floating around etc. i didn't word it very well.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Yeah, one of the pluses of a sub-board with the pots or jacks on it, is that it sure makes it hard for the pots to rotate in their monutings no need to worry about the locking tags.

[R.G.]

Some IC manufactures put a layer of reactive material directly on the IC's core that will react when exposed to air preventing circumvention of the ICs protection mechanisms. Same idea but with better results.

Wow! That's clever!

That would hold me up long enough to find some long-sleeved gloves, a cardboard box, a sheet of plexiglass, and a cylinder of CO2 gas.

A little corrugated surgery, a bit of duct tape, and a slow, gentle breeze of welding shield gas prevents the nasty oxygen (AND nitrogen if they can figure that out ) from setting off the reactive material. If it reacts to CO2, the local welding shop in Bug's Ear Texas also sells cylinders of Argon welding gas. Doggone near nothing reacts with argon.

Anybody with a wafer-probing capability won't even sneeze at air-reactive layers. Fourteen year olds with X-Acto knives will be thoroughly stymied, though.   

[R.G.]

... hit the send button too fast...

The real way is to outrun them. Remember that when the schemos show up on the net.   

[The Tone God]

Anybody with a wafer-probing capability won't even sneeze at air-reactive layers. Fourteen year olds with X-Acto knives will be thoroughly stymied, though.   

Of course there is a way around it but that is only one layer in the multi-layer protection scheme that some ICs have. I'm not sure sure which gas(es) the layer reacts with but the idea is stop the laser guys from getting to the core. Some layers are also light reactive. Oh and I didn't say what the result of the reaction was.

This was just a fun fact for the "dye pack" comment. It certainly would slow down most cloners even at larger organizations but then what could be so special about the circuit that would warrant the cost of such technology. I don't think I have seen anything in the last 20+ years that would. If I were to clone something at that level I would just develop my own version instead of copying.

Andrew

[R.G.]

Yeah - my point is that even theoretically devilishly clever tricks are not necessarily final.

And the point has been made - you can spend a lot of time and money on tricks.

If you put it all into outrunning them, you have a chance.

[brad]

This forum shouldn't be about adding goop...it should be about removing goop.

[The Tone God]

Agreed R.G.

This forum shouldn't be about adding goop...it should be about removing goop.

I thought it was about building our own effects.

Andrew

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

If I were to clone something at that level I would just develop my own version instead of copying.

I'm 100%+ with Andrew on that.
I'd like to see more "input/output" analysis (running sine waves in & seeing what comes out, for example) so that one can get an idea of what a box is doing. Always, there is another - possibly better! - way to do it.

[brad]

Agreed R.G.

This forum shouldn't be about adding goop...it should be about removing goop.

I thought it was about building our own effects.

Andrew

That comes after removing the goop

[ulysses]

thanks to everyone who gave me expoxy tips. i will do my research and development and earn my stripes in goop.

RG
stoop to goop? come on - all is fair in love and stompboxing right? we goop - and we degoop. its part of life. i think i deserve a little credit for my honesty. most people would just create a new forum account before asking such a question.

its saddening that you are dissapointed, however you are right. it does lock the honest people out. i know you are an honest bloke - who wouldnt make clones and put them on ebay - but there are plenty that would. i understand the curiousity of wanting to know how something works and being unable to do so. there are plenty of circuits of which i would love to see the schem - not neccessarily to build - but to see how they work. it happens to everyone. i cant say much more than, sorry guys, i dont want you cloning the months hard work that i put in.

i have not ever had a look in any visual sound stuff - but i presume it is surface mount on multilayer boards. am i right?

as for outrunning the competition.. i intend to. this will give me a headstart.

although i dont want people copying my design, i do put in a lot of time effort to make really nice vero layouts for people. especially the newbies. vero is a good way for people to get into stompboxing and i try to make it easy for them to build some cool circuits - however if you want one i built myself, then you will have to pay for it. i think this is fair enough.

PAUL
i opened up a danelectro spring reverb to take a look at. surface mount. i put the lid back on. not worth thinking about. i have had a look inside some of your stuff too.. and given the ammount of surface mount components the only person i could image reversing one of them them would be puretube (overnight). lol. you dont need to goop becasue there is simply no one out there that could reverse your pedals (except maybe berringer).

if there was a large group of people (a certain german stompboxing forum for example) that could reverse you pedal and make one instead of buying one - would you goop then? what if people sold dodgy copies? would you goop then?

cheers
ulysses

[darron]

10 people cloning your pedal for there selves doesn't sound so bad. almost an honor. 1 person cloning 10 to sell just pisses you off! i'd worry about people making inferior copies. i bet most of us think that nobody can beat the quality of electronics that we make (if someone were to use the same schematic).

where your comfort line? if someone is able to reverse engineer something for themselves then they have probably put in so much effort that it probably would have been much easier for them to buy your product, and maybe they still will? that's not so bad? they probably did it because they thought it would be more fun or because they think they can improve the quality with their own touch. kind of like downloading illegal music and then buying the album after you find out you like it. this probably isn't the case though. but, if someone reverse engineers your product and then posts the schematic/layout for everyone on the internet to build, that's less comfortable! still, those people are putting in just as much (probably more!) effort to clone the pedal than you do making it in a large batch, knowing exactly what to do. they probably did it for the fun of it.

what if you become so large that people on diystompboxes.com (which i love to pieces!!) are making it routinely? have you really lost that much of your market? probably not in my oppinion... it' a rare amount of people who clone, say, the proco rat, rather than buying them.

it's a bit funny how we don't mind ripping off large companies like BOSS, MXR, IBANES (!), etc. but when it comes down to smaller fries like crowther or zvex etc., people consider it an absolute faux pas. i understand it because it's out of respect and you are closer tied to the developers than the larger faceless organisations. what if those guys became the new BOSS? it's perfectly fine then? should we just support them until they are large enough to forget? all of the other companies must have started out with some geeky guy like us who was a whiz with electronics.

buh... i'm tired and streaming crap via my keyboard. i'm not trying to be deeply insightful, but i'm saying a few things that run through my head occasionally. i'd be very interested in criticism / support to what i just added to this thread

[R.G.]

stoop to goop? come on - all is fair in love and stompboxing right? we goop - and we degoop. its part of life.

With regrets, no. All is not fair. Where else but here do you see long discussions of what is ethical in making clones?

The only earthshaking news here is the side of the discussion you take. You're better than that.

i think i deserve a little credit for my honesty. most people would just create a new forum account before asking such a question.

You do deserve credit for honesty. That was never in question.

i have not ever had a look in any visual sound stuff - but i presume it is surface mount on multilayer boards. am i right?

Actually, no. All of the audio products are made with standard pin-in-hole parts. The pedal designs predated my tenure at Visual Sound, but I did the design on the Workhorse amps. Tracing out the Workhorse amp would be trivially easy. Reproducing it would not be, except in a very shoddy imitation that likely would not sound as good. The things about the Workhorse that are unique are things we loudly advertise. The parts are high quality, the mechanical design is focussed on reliability. The layout is the only on-PCB star grounded amp that I have ever heard of, as well as the only production amp that is star grounded that I know of, including hand wired amps. There are many more details that go into it purely for reliabilty and performance that are not part of the schematic.

IMHO the argument for gooping reduces to fear of lost revenue and anger at being copied.

The fear part is easy. The fact is, there are very few cloners in the overall scheme of things. The vast market of effects buyers does not have the skill to solder. Many of them don't have the skill to replace a battery accurately. It's unlikely that cloning will affect your sales in any noticeable way. Most of us here have taken a vow of celibacy as far as posting schemos for low-volume single makers.

Then there are other means of obscurity. Read Dirty Tricks 101. It won't keep a dedicated cloner out, but those tricks are by and large cheaper and more effective than goop. Make it easy for someone to trace out your pedals - incorrectly. Put in a solid-plastic capacitor. Have one solder joint that MUST be bad. Paint a single black ring on a 1M resistor. Bend the IC legs over backwards and print "74HCT275" on the bottom of the chip that now looks like the top. If you have copiers that get around those, you don't have a good chance of keeping them out anyway.

Once a schematic gets a reputation for being wrong, the reputation follows it around the internet. In fact, you could just wait for the schemos to appear, then spread disinformation about them. Or encourage the disinfo if the schematic is in fact incorrect.

The anger is also easy - get over it. What's your objective here? Money or fame?

if there was a large group of people (a certain german stompboxing forum for example) that could reverse you pedal and make one instead of buying one - would you goop then? what if people sold dodgy copies? would you goop then?

No, I wouldn't.

I don't wish you ill. But I do think you're unnecessarily wasting time and money with goop.

[grolschie]

Agreed R.G.

This forum shouldn't be about adding goop...it should be about removing goop.

I thought it was about building our own effects.

Andrew

That comes after removing the goop

I guess that's another reason why many have switched from analog design to digital.  However, nothing is new under the sun. I am sure that the circuit that is to be epoxied, borrows for many aspects of other peoples designs.

I hope that whoever epoxies their designs do offer a lifetime no-questions-asked replacement warranty. It is the right of any owner to repair (or have repaired by an agent) their possessions. If you lock people out from repairing things that they have purchased, then that's not on. Especially if one has to mail the unit halfway around the world to the manufacturer - who might even be out of business shortly.

As we all know, many effects manufacturers do give out schematics to people servicing the products. It seems that only the smaller outfits are so anal to epoxy their designs. Remember it only takes one person (of many trying) to remove the epoxy, figure out your design and post the schematic for all.