me: guitar pedal kits are such a scam, why should I pay 35 bucks for an enclosure and a handful of components
also me: has been meaning to order some enclosures and a bunch of components for literally months but never does because making a shopping list and plugging it all into an online shopping cart is too much work
ooh I am going Out And About this afternoon and there’s an honest-to-god hobbyist electronics store right on the way to my primary destination 👀
Hell yeah got me some transistors and diodes
... I was not going to pay $18 for slightly-too-large aluminum enclosures and I struck out in the footswitch/potentiometer/knob departments, but I should easily be able do a one-stop order of all of *those* online
…made a larger-than-intended order from stompboxparts.com, which combined with parts and equipment acquired in dribs and drabs over the last several years finally sets me up with a proper Lego starter bucket for screwing around with this stuff
I think my first attempted project is going to be a Dallas Rangemaster clone (altered to use an NPN transistor so as to work with center-negative power supplies)
Now, if I could only carve out a few consecutive “brain not used up yet” hours of time to fool around with this stuff 😔
@mayor Ok help me understand here, why would the polarity of the DC jack (I know pedals tend to be center-neg) affect the transistor used in the circuit? Got a schematic link to look at?
@touk will dig up the link when I get back to my desktop but my “still mostly only grasping overall shapes of things” understanding is that the polarity of the transistor’s emitter has to match the current flow from the power supply, and if you want to use it with a daisy chain power supply where everything else is center-negative, you can’t get away with swapping the +/- connections at the jack
@mayor Small Bear!! *checks email* I haven't been in touch with them since 2010 😯
@mayor I was into pedals for like, a year or two....
...in fairness to myself, every time I sit down and try to do the shopping list thing, there's at least one component out of stock, etc. and then an hour later I'm sitting here with 50 tabs open and a headache
... and for the price of a lot of kits now I might as well just buy a premade pedal