Throughout the early months of 2022, my main focus for my projects was guitar pedals. I had just started getting into audio electronics that Fall when I started college and these pedals were a way to help hone my soldering and circuit skills, along with help introduce me to some basic enclosure design.

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     My process generally consisted of finding a circuit and strip board layout (as I wasn't extremely confident building off of more complicated schematics yet) off of a website like tagboardeffects, then I would breadboard it just to make sure I got the circuit right and to just give me an idea of the build. From there, I would work on a basic enclosure design in TinkerCad to fit whichever pedal I was making. It would usually take a few versions, especially the first few times before I had made a template file to design off of. After that, it just came down to assembly. It was definitely a lot of trial and error at the beginning, especially since I had really done anything with enclosures before, but once I had it down it was smooth sailing.

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     This specific project page is focused on the chorus pedal I built as part of this run of guitar pedal builds. This circuit comes from tagboard effects and is a layout by a user named Alex. This was the first build I did that used the PT2399 chip so there was a little bit of a learning curve, but luckily the layout was pretty straight forward. It even included the really fun addition of a speed indicator LED for the chorus rate. I was also quite happy with the design for this project. I'll be honest, the 3D printing didn't turn out to great for the final project. The top layer is quite messy and the backplate has some inconsistencies, but the paint job was something I was very happy with.

 

     This pedal was the final one I consider to be part of this series of builds and I feel it does show off the journey I made. I went from teaching myself how to solder and what a capacitor is, and ended with being able to design my own enclosure and hold a chorus pedal that was built completely by me. It is an extremely rewarding feeling and that rush is what gets me excited to do more and learn more. Just being able to hold a completed build in your hand and listen to the sounds coming out of what you built is all the drive I need.

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