'LIGHTWAH'

[deadastronaut]

ok little changes ive made before it goes onto pcb.. (ive made 2)..

manwah pot..22-25k.

im having a problem trying to get the depth led to gradually fade  rather than the control bunched up one end of the pot...

ive tried a few different pot/resistor variations...basically i want the led to be totally dim to bright..but very gradual..hmm.....

@pappoo , got anywhere with your eagle pcb yet?..

[ppaappoo]

Hi, check the circuit and the values, if it's all ok I'll start with the pcb

[deadastronaut]

hi pappoo. nice one!..

the only things that pop out to me is C7 should be 10nf

and the R10 should be 47k...

otherwise good to go!...

[deadastronaut]

GREAT NEWS GUYS....BUILT IT AND VERIFIED OK!!!!!!!!.....

this pcb works fine ok....

http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/chickpea/?g2_page=2&g2_fromNavId=x02b896a8


had to jiggle the led order about but this is the final revision of it, and all works ok.

edit: using the manual wah, is a great boost for lead....

[isildur100]

Hey congrats! Nice work guys!  What is the official latest and greatest schematic for this? I don't want to use the wrong one

[deadastronaut]

the one above....in my gallery.

[isildur100]

Sorry but in your gallery I only see the pcb layout, I was talking about the schematic. Or maybe i'm blind... 

[deadastronaut]

whoops, oh yeah...i'm blind..

the schematic pappoo has done is correct but with these alterations ok..

C7 should be 10nf

and the R10 should be 47k...

[deadastronaut]

build pics and video soon!. ..

[GBlekas]

$260.00 for that...without shipping?...@#$%ing hell..what a rip!...


update:

anyway...heres where ive got to now with this! project....sounds great with a bit of dirt too...

still working on the layout, had to mess around with the mode switching etc..i'm pretty sure i'll have it done soon-ish...

it'll fit in a 1590b easily.. 3knobs, 2 toggles..
keep em peeled!..

The idea I came up with goes back to a project where I helped out a college student with her final project in college.
I did that for free but a few years later revisited the auto wah idea because I thought it was cool sounding.
The led has to be a sine wave that can go from slow to fast with everything in between.
I will dig up my schematic to compare.
Most auto wahs are auto filters using op-amps and where I went off the typical path.
Instead I started out with a great sounding wah circuit that uses stack of dimes inductors in it.
I came up with all of this on my own and spent the time to figure it out and since time is money in capitalist America I priced the cool machine accordingly. You can buy auto wahs of all sorts for less and you can buy Wahs for as little as $40 But that doesn't make a hand made product a rip off priced higher any more than a Porche is a rip off when you can buy a Kia for much less.

I am now working to make the Pedalworx Cool Machine even cooler by experimenting with running the signal in parallel to the unaffected signal and experimenting with blending the two prior to the output stage. The idea is similar to a wet dry mix concept.
I think the original idea was conceived around 2005
Regards,
George

[deadastronaut]

@george: hi ,

like you say time is money, but if that was the case with me, and the time i have put into 'pulswewah' (and many other projects)

then i would have to sell 1 for thousands if i added all the time and effort up.......and that isnt going to happen..

i do it for the fun and experimentation, and most importantly sound...not money, (i have enough of that already)

i'm just doing mine for pedal board friendliness,(no treadle) as i have a wah anyway!...like most people.

i wanted to keep this as simple as possible  at the same time be a great project with a couple of features to share for free for people to build!....

i have no commercial agenda at all...i cant be arsed with all that!......

i apologise for calling your project a rip, but personally i wouldnt pay that price when i can get a whole multi fx board for much less..imo..

that was my real point. but hey i guess what a man charges for his time and effort is up to him...the sales of it will tell all in the end....

good luck with your stuff man, and i wish you every success..again, no offense intended, just an observation..

blimey i'll have to charge for typing too!..

rob.

nearly built..

[GBlekas]

Well I think your pedal looks great.and appreciate you sharing it with the DIY community.
We all have our needs gear wise and thus our need to build.to fill those needs, as I see it.
There are two ways to skin the auto wah cat with one being a triggered type of thing and the other being the treadle.
The twin t or op amp types being the most common.
I had a bunch of op-amps laying around from doing a bunch of TS 9 to 808 conversions so I went that route.
I took my oscillator circuit from a modeling railroading project that was intended to emulate a light house.
So the light would not just go on and off but do so somewhat gradually
I still needed to modify this to work right as I was looking more for a cross between a wah and a uni-vibe, which happen to be two of my favorite effects.
I did think about using the bulb driver circuit from the univibe but then I wouldn't get rid of all the op-amps I have here.
I have been using a wah for coming up on 40years now so the auto filter thing doesn't sound like a wah to my ear due to that high resonant peak. I think of Jerry Garcia every time I hear one as well. I think of it kind of like his signature so once again I was looking for something different sound wise.
I did a eBay search and found pages of auto wash that are smaller
Here is one
http://cgi.ebay.com/BOSS-AW-2-Auto-Wah-AW2-Guitar-Effects-Pedal-/200595462235?pt=Guitar_Accessories&hash=item2eb46bd85b#ht_699wt_551

This wasn't the only smaller foot print auto wah so I guessing that your idea sounds a lot better in person.
No reason to get defensive about gear, it's all good!
Now if you only share how to become independently wealthy so that money is never an issue with us we would have it totally going on!  LOL

[GBlekas]

On multi fx pedals: one band I am playing with the other guitar player uses a multi fx pedal and while it sounds good on it's own it doesn't cut through the band mix during a solo!  Thus my dislike of most short of the better rack pieces which cost considerably more. So I don't see the argument but that is my ear and experience doing the talking there.

[joegagan]

not to go off on too much of a derail here but i experienced that same 'smallness of sound' from guys using  multifx prcessors for over 17 years now. they would show up to our jam nite all proud of their new kidney bean shaped wonder that sounded like tom sholz at the their house, plug into a real amp only to be totally buried on the mix. solution? go unplug them from their processor and give em a fuzz pedal and a real amp and BOOM they are back in house m-fer!

i suspect that the a to d to a to d to a conversion along with all sorts of weird buffering and compression/eq are the culprits in those multiFX. zooms are especially freaky with their eq curve and noise suppresion, YUK.

back to your regularly scheduled pulsewah thread. nice work, mr astronautman!

[deadastronaut]

ha ha, nice one guys..

:yep agree about the multi fx's i hate digital, they are ok through a pa, but they always have to be gated too which ruins any subtlety in solo's etc.....thats really what got me into diy in the first place.

looking for 'that sound'...which of course we all are...(well anyone with ears!. )

:the train circuits, yeah, i used a railway crossing lights circuit for a stereo/panning tremolo too....great stuff, the lighthouse circuit one sounds perfect for a sine ....nice!.
i kept messing around with different fading led circuits, and they worked fine on breadboard...till i put it all together and the notorious cmos555 ticked.which i thought i had
cured in other projects....hmmmm..

: money, its easy to make , just a lot harder to stop your wife spending it all....lol..

anyway, i know we are not inventing anything  spectacularly new here , but at least we are not merely  replicating the same ol same old eh!...theres no enjoyment/challenge  for me in that!.

and i am more of a tinkerer with ideas, and am by no means an EE...but i enjoy a  bit of tinkering...

cheers guys. rob.

nearly finished btw....

i dont know how i got side tracked off of the morley version, but it did seem to have a better wah than the colorsound, so i'm also working on a layout/pcb for
that version again..this first pedal is the prototype...(which my mate is begging me for already.. )..so there may be 2 eventual versions of it in the end...

[GBlekas]

I think the ticking is picked up by the filter circuit from the timing chip, In your circuits case.
This could have something to do with a shared power source but I think it's a lot more likely being picked up through induction.
I was beginning to believe the reason tuned filters were always used for auto wahs was because they could tune out the annoying ticking frequencies a lot easier. It took me awhile to figure out but I finally nailed it by added small pf caps to Q1 & Q2 of the wah circuit.

I took a few pix using the cell phone and will post them if you want to see what my pedal looks like. I did the Cool Machine two different ways. One was in a wah shell and the other a Hammond box with the pix being of the Hammond version.

You posted something about using CMOS chip to prevent ticking.....did that work or not?

I will post the light house circuit too if you want.

On the univibe side I also came up with an idea, drew it out but never tried it. The idea was to improve the out of phase cancellation of this circuit in a very simple way. I will get to the breadboarding of it and if it works like I think it will work I will put it up as well.

FYI, the reason to put a pedal up for a high price is twofold. One is that it takes a bunch of time to build and two is that it limits how many I sell which frees me up to do a bunch of other things. ;-)

[deadastronaut]

hi george,

i sorted the ticking out on another project,i lowered the voltage to the cmos 555 and it cured it, but it didnt work the same on this one..so went for a different sine lfo....

may have  to give your pf cap idea a go..

yeah be great to see ya pics...and the lighthouse circuit..cool man!..

on the price of things you have spent time developing...yep i do agree!.... ...

phewwww   finally got round to finishing the pedal off today, amongst finishing a guitar neck repair.and other stuff......(glad thats over)..

heres the pics guys.

[GBlekas]

How did you do the lettering and design work?
Love the guitar/design!
Is that silk screened or a clear label?
Looks nice

Is there room for a battery?
Have any gut shots?

[deadastronaut]

How did you do the lettering and design work?
Love the guitar/design!
Is that silk screened or a clear label?
Looks nice

Is there room for a battery?
Have any gut shots?

hi man, the lettering is etched into the aluminium with ferric chloride..same as pcb's.toner method.. then etch is filled with black paint...sanded...
then laquered over to stop the aluminium oxidising and going dull...
no battery..no room..  
the guts are quite    

but here ya go..very untidy due to having to pull it out and do it twice...one of my leds decided to not work after i installed it.. which in turn stopped the ldr/led too..

dont laugh!...

[GBlekas]

If you could give me more info on the box etching I would appreciate it as I would love to try that out some time.

In your box I think what I may have tried is using double face tape over the pots and attaching the board there.
Then raising the jack and stomp switch to create a cavity for the battery.
DC power jack may be easier to deal with if it was right in the top middle so it would lay between the pots.
I started using Switchcraft closed type jacks as they seem to take up less room in a box. Also if you lay them close to the top side of the box the box itself keeps them from moving/spinning.


The top of this pic is what I ended up using and the bottom is the 555 chip which I decided against.
I put yours in the middle because I found I had to add a 1 meg pot between the stages like you did.
I also found that in series with a 75k resistor was just about perfect.
The ticking I experienced would not happen until I put the bottom plate of the wah on so this proves to me that it was being picked up through induction and how I got to modify the wah circuit to get rid of the ticking. I never thought to lower the voltage to the oscillator but that's a cool idea.



Here is what the box version looks like outside and in.





As you can see I was thinking univibe by the speed knob.
Here is a quick noodle with the pedal.
I reversed the clip midway to see what that would sound like.
I think, in the end, I managed to get a sound I had not heard before, which is what I was after.


http://pedalwor.startlogic.com/sounds/Les_Wah.wav


What's weird about the clip is backwards kind of sounds like a mess while forwards sounds backwards to me.