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.

6. Octave down, Flip Flops and Latches
Lets have a look at a few different ways to create octave down using CMOS chips.

In all of the examples below something called a flip flop will do the frequency dividing. The flip flop/latch is one of the fundamental logic building blocks. It's used to store data and is how RAM memory in our computers works. One flip flop can store 1 bit of data, which means that it can hold a high or low state until we tell it otherwise. This can be very useful, for example when we want to use a momentary switch to turn something on or off until we press it again. Flip flops can also be used as oscillators, counters and much more.

But now let's focus on frequency dividing. What it does, to put it as simple as possible: Each time the clock (our input signal) goes high, the output changes state. Since the output only changes on the positive transitions and holds that state on the negative transitions we get exactly half the frequency at the output, like this:

Pre-filtering
Making a octave down circuit with CMOS is easy since we are now working with 1's and 0's. Getting good tracking is harder, but there are a few simple measures we can take to get acceptable tracking. The first thing to keep in mind is that we can improve tracking significantly by using the neck pickup of the guitar and the treble rolled off. But we also need to add a lowpass filter after our schmitt trigger since it adds alot of high frequency content. There are many different lowpass filters we can use, varying in complexity, but for this article we'll use a simple passive RC filter.

1. Dual D-Flip Flop (CD4013)
This chips is used in the MXR Blue Box, MadBean Lowrider, The Rocktave and many others.

This chip has two D-flip flops. The D prefix means that it changes output state on positive transitions only, exactly what we need. For two octaves down, we'll just put both flip flops of the chip in series so that the second flip flop will divide the output of the first flip flop.

• Input goes to Clock
• The NOT Q output (Q with a line) goes back to the data input (D) via a 10K resistor
• Set and Reset goes to ground
• Q or NOT Q goes to output. NOT Q is the inverted output
• VCC to V+ and VSS to ground

2. Binary Ripple Counter (CD4024)
This chip is what I used in the Arcadiator. it's very common in DIY synth stuff and it's also used in the Slacktave (by Slacker, the designer of the Echo Base) and the Bit Commander by Earthquaker Devices. It's very simple to use and require no extra external components.

The CD4024 chip is a counter that advances one count every time the clock changes from high to low. The first output is divided by two, and the next output divides the preceding output by two and so on, up to output 7 that has the input frequency divided by 128. This means that each output is one octave lower.

• Input goes to Ø
• Reset goes to ground
• Q1 is the one octave down output
• Q2 is the two octaves down output
• VCC to V+ and VSS to ground

3. NAND Gates (CD40106, CD4093)
Let's look at how it's possible to make a D-flip flop out of NAND gates.

As you can see, it requires many gates and even one 3-input gate, which means we have to use at least two chips. But remember that I mentioned that schmitt triggers can be configured to make NAND and NOR gates?

A schmitt trigger gate can be made into a multiple input NAND or NOR gate using 1N4148 diodes and a resistor, with as many inputs as we want. This is something I picked up from Ray Wilson, he calles it "mickey mouse logic". This makes the CD40106 a very versatile chip, and using this neat trick we can make a flip flop out of a single CD40106 chip.

The same mickey mouse logic can be applied to the 2-input CD4093 schmitt trigger by first connecting both inputs together (which makes a NOT gate).

A good way to test these octave down circuits on the breadboard is to connect a LFO with a LED to the input and another LED at the output. That way we can easily see if it works. I tested the NAND schematic first with a freeware program called Logic Circuit just to make sure it would work, then I breadboarded it. This is the result.