Soldering & Circuitry Project
This was the first soldering kit I built. It came with instructions and all the parts necessary to turn the PCB into a functioning alarm circuit. This kit gave me not only the confidence to solder but also some basic knowledge of what components do what in a schematic.
It had a basic speaker and LED oscillator that was controlled by a 555 timer computer chip that turned on and off the LEDs and created a 2-tone alarm. A potentiometer controlled the speed of the 555 timer, which in effect controlled the speed, volume, and pitch of the oscillator and LEDs.
On the PCB itself there were spaces to practice solder joints and get better at wiring up jumper cables, which helped a lot to get comfortable with getting smooth connections.
This was the second kit I made, a very basic distortion guitar pedal that was a lot of fun to put together. It showed me how clipping diodes worked to get that distorted tone, and how the potentiometers were used to shape the sound and volume of the circuit.
This kit also came with instructions and all of the necessary parts to wire it up, so I did not need to make any choices about what components to use.
This project inspired me to make my own pedal, or at least start to understand how to make my own and choose my own components to get certain tones.
I finally bought my own components and breadboard that allowed me to experiment and follow tutorials online on how to create my own circuits. This was the point in which I started to understand what each part of the circuit is doing, and how to utilize them in different scenarios. I watched a video on transistors and how to use logic gates to create different states of active/inactivity.
This is an oscillating circuit using only resistors, LED’s, capacitors, and transistors. There is no timer controlling the sequence except for the flow of electrons and the transistors locking certain states. A button input sends a voltage that opens one transistor which is connected to another, locking that one, which creates a loop.
This is where I started to feel confident in my ability to experiment and start switching out components to get different results. (In this circuit, switching out different capacitors changed the speed of the oscillation because it took longer/shorter to charge up the capacitor.)
This is the completed circuit that I wired up from scratch. It is based on the design below, however, I changed a couple of components because I didn’t have the exact ones, and I changed some out deliberately to change the tone of the fuzz/distortion. A distortion pedal is the easiest to make because all that is happening is that the voltage coming through gets limited by the diode and clipped on the way out.
Figuring out how 3DPT foot pedal switches work was a challenge in itself, but once I figured it out, it was easy to take an input/output and use an LED to indicate if the signal was running through the circuit or getting bypassed.
The tone is very rough and could be changed depending on what diode is running through it, but I like the fact that it is more aggressive and breaks up more than most “professional” pedals are made for.
I am super happy with how far I have come in circuit-making, and want to continue making different pedals and finding out how to shape tones into how I want them to be. At my recording studio I have also been fixing XLR cables and teaching interns how to solder, so I am utilizing these skills in real life already!
