Why I Rarely Post Projects Anymore

Alot of my projects are things I've thought of (unless otherwise noted) and over the years I've gotten a bit pissed off with people building my stuff, selling it on without even bothering to credit me in anyway. I don't care if people build/sell this stuff but one of the unwritten rules of open source stuff is that you always credit the original person.

Today I was on eBay searching for pro audio stuff just cause I like buying that stuff and I came across a modified UV300 pedal being sold by some guy called "modestmikesmods" with absolutely no mention of where the mod originated even though it makes mention of things I said in the blog post and even referenced the fact that I put the switch on the side but in a round about way tries to claim it was their idea.

I've seen many of my projects floating around being sold by various people with no mention or link to where it came from and it put me off sharing stuff so I simply stopped bothering putting effort into posting here. But seeing this on eBay was the straw that broke the camels back. 

people within "open source" give you stuff they've spent time and money developing - the very least you can do is respect them enough to link to the original post and/or credit them ESPECIALLY if you're making money out of them.

behringer-uv300-Mod

20 Second Handwashing Timer (for Covid-19) stripboard layout

quite a simple project, during the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, one of the pieces of advice we've been given is to wash our hands for 20 seconds. so here's a timer circuit to help you do that.

"sw" is a push-to-make momentary switch, once you press the button, the LED illuminates for about 25 seconds (I added a few seconds to the timer to allow time to put soap on your hands). then just wash your hands till the LED goes off.
pretty good way to make sure your kids are washing their hands for long enough.

Stay safe.

    before it was deployed to the bathroom

Dual LED 3PDT Stomp switch daughterboard PCB layout

I haven't done stripboard construction for a long time, truth is I've been busy with my engineering work, my bands and my mixing work to sit down and do stripboards but I've been doing PCB layouts for little projects and I thought I might aswell post them here

first of all is this little daughter-board for your guitar fx builds that will change a dual colour LED from red to green depending on the switch state; so you can use it as some kind of channel indicator or simply just have a LED to say whether the pedal is engaged or not

here is a link to the rar of the .PDF files (the only way I can seem to get boards to print at the right size) http://www.mediafire.com/file/aszhtwj0vd9xcc0/Stomp.rar/file

Here it is in a pedal I made years ago (https://paulinthelab.blogspot.com/2014/06/green-wizard-guitar-overdrive.html)

Amptweaker Defizzerator Stripboard Layout

I went to the shop yesterday hoping to buy 2 Amptweaker Defizzerators for a recording session but of course; they only had 1, so I bought 1 and reverse engineered it. it's a passive circuit so you get a bit of loss and I may work on a buffered version at a later date but for now;
enjoy.

May Queen Overdrive (originally by Runoffgroove.com) Stripboard layout

I used to make this pedal a lot and sell them on eBay so I thought I'd revisit it as it seems that I sold the one I made for myself too.
Anyway this is a pretty cool effect, it has a lot more drive than a standard treble booster and it layers up really nicely.

Red Wizard Fuzz Stripboard Layout

this is the 3rd guitar effect in the "wizard" collection.
As anyone who has followed this site for long enough will know, I always make my pedals very minimal when it comes to controls but if anyone does add to this circuit I'd love to see what you've done.

anyway, enjoy.

Maxon Treble Booster Stripboard Layout

I came across this interesting little thing so I thought I would make a clone of it.
it's a maxon treble booster.

they also did one called the power booster and as far as I can see the only differences between that and this is that the power booster has 2 470n capacitors in place of the 2.2n capacitors.

Electret Microphone Preamp Stripboard Layout

someone asked me to do this, so I did. it's a useful little circuit to power those little electret microphones.

Piss Off batteriser

when doing the admin part of this site,nothing infuriates me more than having a company trying to advertise their snakeoil products in the comments section.
I often get comments where someone has copied a bit of the text from my blog post and then shoved a link to some crappy product after it and usually I just delete it but given the fact that Batteriser has been so underhanded and dishonest about everything they do and claim - I thought I would call this one out.

Dave Jones from the EEVblog has debunked their product in just about every way imaginable and they've done some hilarious reply videos to him where some "engineer" is sat at a table with an oscilloscope hooked up to its own 1Khz reference/cal signal (with very badly compensated probes), some wires and boards and a suspiciously new and cheap looking soldering iron; explaining why Dave is wrong. then, when that failed they just paid people to downvote his videos.

so Batteriser, do not advertise your shitty, useless products on my site.

Daves Videos

Very Accurate 10volt and 5volt Reference For Testing Multimeters etc. Stripboard Layout

I thought this would be a good project to keep around to see if my digital multimeter has drifted out of calibration.

I power it from a normal bench power supply but it would probably be better if you used 2 9v batteries in series.

The LED on it displays when over 100mA is being drawn from it - basically if the LED is lit disconnect it or things will be getting very hot!

I tested it in free air with open windows over 2 hours and it was very stable so I can rely on it.

Linear Tech do a few different drop references for this IC
the 2 I've tried are the 10 volt reference and the 5 volt reference
the part numbers are
10 volt reference; LT1021BCN8-10
5 volt reference; LT1021CCN8-5

it stayed at 10.0006 for over 2 hours - the least significant digit moved around but that's 10's of uVolts!