Update 2016-12-20: Updated the info for the 2.5 version

Here's a minor update for the Arcadiator.

Changelog:

• Optimized circuit
• Improved schmitt trigger
• Fixed clean blend mod

​Read more about the mods in the build document.

The Modboard
Also released is this small LFO trianglewave daughterboard.

It can be connected together with the Arcadiator to modulate the pulse width for even more C64'ish sounds...
Many Parasit Studio boards will have Modboard connections in future revisions that will allow for new crazy sounds.

The modboard can be used to modulate just about any pot in any circuit that is set up as a variable resistor. You just have to experiment with the type of vactrol (or LED+LDR) to find the one to best suit your purpose.

Wookie 2010-2016
Alittle over a month ago I lost my pet, my best friend and companion that I've had for the last 6 years. Her name was Wookie, a wonderful and very special dog.

She could do a ton of tricks (some that she came up with herself). She loved to take long walks, jump up on things, swim, play and training (agility). he was very social and loved to just hang out, even when I was recording bands. She would often fell asleep at the feet of singers while recording  (even screaming vocals). She always knew when we were planning stuff. Even when we talked quietly she could pick out words out of long sentences and get totally psyched for something to happen. She was very intense (alittle bit of a nutcase in a good way) with all her emotions on the outside. Easily stressed and fragile but very fun, warm and loving. Wookie my sweet darling, I love you and I miss you.

Because of her passing I kinda lost my inspiration for pedal building and breadboarding new things, so that's why there's been very few blog updates lately and I apologize if I have been slow to reply when people are asking for help. I hope that some inspiration will return to me eventually because I have alot of ideas that I have not explored yet.

Ray Wilson 1955 - 2016
I would also like to dedicate this post to Ray Wilson - A true DIY legend within the synth DIY community and the creator of Music from other space. He recently passed away, and it saddens me alot. He was a big inspiration to me and his book Make: Analog Synthesizers got me interested in making pedals with cmos. It has a very brief but good chapter about cmos uses that led me to buy the CMOS Cookbook and without it I would not have come up with ideas for many of my pedals. I also was in contact with Ray a few times and he always wrote excellent replies (I still have a Subcommander Guitar Synth PCB waiting to be finished). Thank you Ray for your great contribution to the DIY community and for being a true inspiration. Rest in Peace.

edit 2016-04-26: Limited edition fully assembled pedals now avaliable!

Here's a new DIY project - the Xor'cist stutter fuzz and ringmod. It's now avaliable as a PCB and as a fully assembled pedal.

I have been wanting to do a CMOS based squarewave stutter fuzz (a choppy on/off type tremolo) for quite a while. I have also been thinking about doing an extended version of the Corruptor ringmod (without the over-the-top sequencer of the King Corruptor) so I decided to combine both these ideas into one circuit and this is the result. :)

It can do fuzz, ring modulation or a blend of both. With the stutter engaged it will do stuttering fuzz, stuttering ringmod or alternating between fuzz and ringmod (depending on the mix knob setting). The momentary stutter footswitch can be disengaged and the LFO can be off/on/gated.

The Xor'cist uses a CD4070 XOR chip (hence the name) to achieve both the ringmod and the stuttering effect. It's basically the bastard big brother of the Corruptor.

PCB and complete pedal avaliable in the webshop

Here's a new DIY project called the "Subspace Transmission Fuzz"

This is a fuzz with a recording and playback feature based on the ISD1820 voice recording chip. It can record up to 20 seconds and the playback can be repeated and pitched up or down. It's perfect for playing along to your riffs and coming up with new ideas, or why not make a short repeating loop and pitch it down for some sick drone sounds!

Please note that it can't be used to do overdubs because of the limitations of the chip and the repeat is not fluid, but it's still pretty awesome what a 14 pin dip chip can do. :)

I hope you like it!
​/ Fredrik

PCB avaliable now in the shop

Update 2016-03-16: I added a vero layout
​
It has been a slow start to 2016, but a few new projects are finally coming together. Here's a new DIY project - The Sentient Machine.

It's a resonant lowpass filter modulated with an LFO. It has a couple of different voice settings, a standard wah sound and a special vowel sound. At slow speeds it makes a cool spacey sweeping sound reminiscent of a phaser, and at minimum depth and medium speed it almost sounds like a tremolo.

This circuit is pretty advanced, but it's a straight forward build. The PCB is made to fit inside a 125B enclosure.

The madman Savvas (@tagboardeffects) submitted a vero layout. Thanks! Please note that it's not yet verified.

PCB avaliable in the shop

Getting artwork onto the enclosure has always been a big challenge for me and it probably the hardest thing to do yourself. I started out with bare boxes, later using dymo tape, ink stamps, toner transfers and finally etching. I have never liked waterslide decals, especially the way it looks after a bit of wear and tear (even with several layers of clearcoat). I know some people use epoxy to cover the enclosures to create good protection and a shiny look, but that is too time consuming and messy for me. Etching is great, because it will never wear off, but that is also very time consuming and the result is kinda hit and miss for me (I guess I need more practice). It also involves chemicals that can stain you favourite clothes...

For my Arcadiator builds I outsourced the faceplates (which were silk screened), but the fiberglass material used was not very scratch resistant and the quality of the silk screen was poor. I probably had to throw away about half of them...

All this considered, and since i'm not longer building pedal for myself only, I decided to buy a laser - The Emblaser by Darkly Labs is a cheapest laser avaliable on the market (around $1000 AUD + shipping and import taxes and about $100 more in software if you will be using raster based graphics) and was first made possible through kickstarter. The laser comes in parts and you have to assemble it yourself. Many of the parts are 3d-printed and you can see where Darkly Labs had cut corners to be able to offer a laser at this price.

​Unfortunatley my laser came with several bad parts with misdrilled holes, which led to days of frustration because of alignment issues. I contacted Darkly labs and they sent me new parts that solved my problems. Next up was actually getting artwork done with the laser. It's was a very steep learning curve, but luckely my friend Jimmie at Reaper Pedals made me a very helpful instructional video. Thanks!

Making faceplates for Into the Unknown

Jimmie's instructional video (in swedish)

For the faceplates i'm using a two layer plastic material called laserply. The actual engraving time is about two hours for engraving and 12 minutes for cutting. The engraving leaves a horrible smell of burnt plastic, so I will probably build some kind of box with air conditioning that goes outside.

VERDICT
Good things: Good results, cheap (for a laser), small footprint
Bad things: Poor quality control, weak laser, steep learning curve, limited use of colours

I wouldn't recommend it for the average hobbyist, but it's a decent alternative for a small company, if you have the patience.

Update 2015.12.04
Pedal and PCB released. Info updated. :)

Here's a really fun and versatile circuit, avaliable both as a complete pedal and a DIY project.  Into the Unknown Guitar Synthesizer Deluxe - this is basically a expanded version of the 0415 guitar synth, but with alot more controls and a few new features. It's a pretty big project with 8 pots and 3 switches, but with a low component count.

It can do brutal fuzz, theremin sounds, synthy octaves down and up, flanger'ish modulation, drone'ish noise and oscillation and more...

​Here's a demo video (complete with cheesy intro)

0:00 - Intro
0:27 - Fuzz
0:43 - Fuzz with one octave down
1:00 - Fuzz with two octaves down
1:11 - Fuzz with one octave up
1:23 - Fuzz with two octaves up
1:34 - Both octave down and up
2:02 - Fuzz Flanger
2:41 - Various modulation settings
5:21 - Theremin sounds!
​6:13 - Self oscillation / drone noise

1. Theremin sounds + one or two octaves down

2. Fuzz Flanger with varying strenght and speed

3. Brutal fuzz double tracked with programmed drums and bass
With alittle flanger effect in the "intro"

4. Single note "chords" with a ringmod'ish setting + octave down
Only works on certain notes, depending on the setting

5. Self oscillation (by turning down the gate pot) with filter sweeps
Reacts to the guitar controls and LFO. Perfect for drone'ish noise

6. Octaves up+down (same as 0415) + squarewave modulation
​The warp pot controls the character of the modulation

7. Fuzz + octaves down and up and trianglewave modulation

There is no EQ post processing on the guitar in the sound examples, only a touch of reverb and a limiter on the master.

Update 2015-10-09
The new 0415 Guitar Synth is done and PCB's are now avaliable in the shop! :)
​A verified vero layout added to the bottom of this post.

This is a simple but fun pedal that transforms the signal into a square wave, up to five octaves apart: one or two octaves up can be mixed with one or two octaves down for super synthy sounds.

What makes this special is that the octave up part is based on a frequency controlled oscillator so it doesn't scramble chords like usual octave circuit and it tracks well over the entire fretboard. Compared to the Arcadiator it sounds less like a fuzz and more like a pure synth. It can be very controlled, but also make superglitchy sounds.

In case you are wondering about the name, it has nothing to do with the CD4015 chip used. It's the birthday of my dog. :)

I made a quick recording of a cheesy "blues". The settings on both tracks were one octave down and two octaves up.

Since a couple of years back I've been doing all my vero layouts using DIY Layout Creator 3.27.0. It's a good and simple freeware program.

However, I'm lazy so I like to sit in the sofa or lay in bed working on layouts with my ipad. Up until now I have used a streaming app (splashtop) for my ipad to remote control my computer. It has worked ok, but far from a perfect solution. So I was very excited when I heard that Harald Sabro was doing a dedicated stripboard app.

After using it for a while to make a few layouts, here are my thoughts: It's very intuitive and easy work with. I started making my first layout just minutes after downloading the app. The GUI looks nice and it's obvious that Harald has spent alot of thought into the design. I was worried that the touchscreen interface would be a problem, but it works great. Even small trace cuts are easy to move around without accidentally moving the wrong component. The first version was missing a feature to display the values directly on the components (which I prefer) but that got added in version 1.1. I have encountered one small bug when the app freezes up for a while when deleting several components in a row, but overall it runs great without any crashes and I expect any bugs to be fixed in future updates. Compared to DIY Layout Creator (which can do alot more than just stripboard layouts) it lacks features such as being able to resize components ect, but for my needs it's perfect. Highly recommended and worth every penny!

StripboardCAD is limited to iOS and costs $9,99 in the appstore.

This post is alittle more personal... But I just had to share this. :)

This little fellow to the right is moving in with us next week.
His name is Silver Fox, but we'll call him Lee (after Bruce).

Funny thing is that when the kennel owner (a friend) needed a theme for the names, she decided to name them after my guitar effects! :D So this little bunch of puppies are named: Arcadiator, Sonic Reducer, Stepping Stone, Raygun Youth, Sidescroller and Silver Fox.

These are the registered birth names, so what their owners will call them later is up to them. But still... So I couldn't resist keeping one of them, the only black dog.