From Schematic to Reality

[dano12]

I get a bunch of emails every week from my beavis site. After a while, I hear the same set of questions enough to make me sit down and write a little article. This month's effort is all about how to start reading schematics, understand them, and then transform them from the abstract to reality. It is aimed at beginners, but I would truly appreciate any feedback you guys have.

http://www.beavisaudio.com/techpages/SchematicToReality

[jlullo]

Dano,
i haven't had a chance to get all the way through it yet, but this is some great work!  thanks so much for taking the time to work this out for everyone.  What i've read through seems like it's going to be a great help to a lot of people here!

Jonathan

[CLAAS]

Hello Dano
GREAT,GREAT WORK!!!!

[Timebutt]

Wow, incredibly nice article!
This could have saved a lot of questions when I started out

[iaresee]

Dano, I love reading your stuff. You do awesome graphics. The diagrams really make that piece. Much easier to digest with great pictures to go along with the text.

[puretube]

Nice,
but this thread is not complete without a
(non-spam, because it is coming from an innocent bystander...)
hint at:
THE Stompbox Breadboard

[dano12]

Nice,
but this thread is not complete without a
(non-spam, because it is coming from an innocent bystander...)
hint at:
THE Stompbox Breadboard

Sorry, you lost me?

[ubersam]

Excellent!

[Mark Hammer]

While at this point, it feels like a trivial thing to me, one of the things I find many are mystified by is how one mentally divides a circuit into functional units or sub-circuits.  You and I look at a schematic and we "see" the LFO section, the clock circuit, the side-chain, the filter section, the "input stage", the "mixer stage", and so on.  Beginners look at the same drawing and simply see a maze of components.  Same way I look under the hodd of my car and I don't immediately see the electrical/ignition system, the carburator, and so on.

Myself, I've been able to get an intuitive understanding of the sub-circuits by simply staring at thousands and thousands of related schematics for thousands and thousands of hours.  But there has to be a faster way than that.

If you can come up with a way to teach people how to do that mental clustering of components, you will have done the world a very great service.  Still, what you already have there ain't too shabby! 

[GREEN FUZ]

Nice,
but this thread is not complete without a
(non-spam, because it is coming from an innocent bystander...)
hint at:
THE Stompbox Breadboard

Sorry, you lost me?

I thnk he`s just giving you a 'plug' of the promotional variety.

Great instructional BTW. Wish I`d had something as simple and concise when I started.

[frequencycentral]

Interesting that your LPB schematic shows R2 as 1M and R4 as 100K.

The first one I built from THIS schematic, which is linked to in this forum's schematic section, shows R2 as 430K and R4 as 43K.

Then again, I built another recently for my booster-souped Valvecaster (thanks Dano - see 'Pictures' thread) using R2 as 390K and R4 as 39K, because I didn't have 430K and 43K 'in stock'.

I guess if the respective values are at a 10-1 ratio then the transistor is correctly biased...............hey, I learnt something!

The page is excellent - your entire site is very inspirational.

[dano12]

Thanks guys, glad you liked it!

Mark: I've had several false starts at writing a 'snippets' article. I've seen the same chunks or repeated patterns that you speak of, and thought it would be a great learning exercise to both explore and catalog them. What's kept me from completion is a better understanding of the interactions. If the pieces were truly plug-and-play, then I'd probably be able to write semi-intelligently about them. But I am still at the beginners level when it comes to the complex interactions between these snippets. Often on the breadboard, my desire to interchange these seemingly discrete blocks has met with failure in terms of actually sounding good. So the quest continues....

frequencycentral: the resistors you refer to are the voltage divider that provides the reference point for Q1. From my understanding, as long as the ratio is the same (10 to 1 in our case) the circuit is the same. Of course, there may be difference in the circuit's input impedance, but I'm not smart enough yet to calculate that.

Thanks for the awesome feedback.

[slacker]

[puretube]

I thnk he`s just giving you a 'plug' of the promotional variety.

Green: you got it! 

[tiges_ tendres]

Nice,
but this thread is not complete without a
(non-spam, because it is coming from an innocent bystander...)
hint at:
THE Stompbox Breadboard

I saw that the other day and nearly put my hand in my pocket!  Great idea.  I hope you sell a lot of those.

[dano12]

Nice,
but this thread is not complete without a
(non-spam, because it is coming from an innocent bystander...)
hint at:
THE Stompbox Breadboard

I saw that the other day and nearly put my hand in my pocket!  Great idea.  I hope you sell a lot of those.

You can build one yourself! There's a wiring diagram for the breakout box, plus the user guide and all the projects are freely downloadable.

[petemoore]

  Way to point to the plug tip!
  Angles on pinouts and use of colors make these diagrams easy to follow clearly, I wish you had drawn diagrams for some of the data sheets I've had to suffer through.

[Processaurus]

Great article, and cheerful diagrams, I'll be pointing people to it who ask me how to build a pedal, in a nutshell.

Oh, super tiny detail, in your IC diagram, the pin labeled pin 14 should be labeled 16.  Maybe label pin 9 somehow to show the U shaped numbering system painfully clear.

I'm sure you've answered this a lot, but do you make your diagrams in illustrator? Do you do graphic design work when you aren't making fuzz labs?

[Schappy]

Dano,
That is awesome. I think you will save yourself a thousand beginner questions with that article. Great Stuff! Thanks!

[dano12]

Great article, and cheerful diagrams, I'll be pointing people to it who ask me how to build a pedal, in a nutshell.

Oh, super tiny detail, in your IC diagram, the pin labeled pin 14 should be labeled 16.  Maybe label pin 9 somehow to show the U shaped numbering system painfully clear.

I'm sure you've answered this a lot, but do you make your diagrams in illustrator? Do you do graphic design work when you aren't making fuzz labs?

Lol, pin 14. Math was never my strong suit.

All stuff is done in Visio. Graphics aren't my profession, but I enjoy them nonetheless.