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Thanks guys! Appreciate it I'm lucky to have such an awesome artistic friend.

Figured I'd share more of my handpainted enclosures.
Artwork by www.jeffniesen.com

This is the Aion Flare Fuzz Machine

Tough pedal to dial in. Still gonna try some other transistors for fun, hopefully I can find a use for it.

Eye lights and hand light are both main bypass. Was just messing around with trying to make it look like it's holding a light or something. It turned out okay.

That artwork is killer! Is it hand painted? Looks amazing

Yeah hand painted! He's an amazing artist. I put probably 5 layers of clearcoat on it to protect it.

Hey all- super pumped about this one. So brutal sounding, love it.
Got this up and running today after the amazing help from the tech forum here.
Artwork by my good friend -> www.jeffniesen.com
Eyes are main bypass lights, footswitch light is the boost section. Thinking about making it so the boost light can stay on when the main bypass is off just so I know what I'm getting into when I turn the pedal on. But that can wait for now. Just pumped to have this beast working.

I flipped the layout of the board to not intrude on the artwork as much.

Thanks for the help!
I think the little pieces of solder you see in the picture might be light reflecting off of flux, but I'll double check and clean it up.

I threw a chip in there and plugged my guitar in just to hear it not work one more time and it works now!

I now have steady voltage at pins 6 and 7. So I'm guessing it was the pot? Anyways. This thing rips hard and I'm pumped I got it working. Fingers crossed to the boost side working

Thanks again to everyone for your help-
Should I delete this thread?

-Elliot

Okay I replaced the pot and the capacitor. Still getting some voltages on pin 6 and 7 without an IC in there. So lost on what to do now

Could be C4 or the Gain pot itself causing the issue. Or, perhaps a small copper bridge on the PCB side. Try removing IC1 and measuring the voltage on pins 6 and 7 with no IC. You should have none. Definitely with the IC the problem seems to be pin 6 and 7 voltages.

You can also use an Xacto knife to gently score around the pads on 6 and 7 to make sure there are no bridges (I'm assuming you've etched a PCB here).

Thank you for your help!
Definitely still getting some voltage on 6 & 7 without the IC in. I don't have an exacto knife, but it looks clean (i attached a picture). It was an etched board from Keefe here on the forum, looked flawlessly done.
Is there a way to test the capacitor without just throwing a new one in there to see if it works?

I'm gonna replace the pot and see if that fixes the issue, then if it doesn't, I'll try replacing the capacitor.

Thanks again for the help

-Elliot

Not sure how to embed images but here are a couple pictures of the board-

https://ibb.co/Bctrs5J
https://ibb.co/kHJCCny

I haven't looked, but is the boost separated from the drive side? The original wasn't, so you had to have both sides built and connected for it to work. I know my board, they're separate.


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I could be misreading the schematic. But based on the schematic and a wiring diagram of the pedal they seem to be separated in this version. That's interesting though. I'll try that later tonight just in case. Thank you!

Apparent fix: Replaced gain pot and C4 capacitor and fired it  back up and it seems to be working.

Original post:
Hey all-  I attached the PDF of the project.
Built up this board today and working on getting the distortion side up and running. Haven't tested the boost yet, but figured I'd fix this one first cause the boost is a much simpler circuit.
Issue: The tone is REAL farty/fuzzy. No sustain at all. Have to hit the strings pretty hard to get sound through. All the knobs seem to be doing more or less what they're meant to do.
I'm thinking the problem is somewhere to do with IC1. I checked the capacitor values surrounding it along with the resistors.

I'm new to using an audio probe, but here's what I found with that.
With IC1, the farty sound seems to be there on both pin 6 and 7 with pin 6 a lot lower in volume.  pin 7 seems to be normal volume but has the farty/no sustain thing going on and only registers if I really hit the strings hard.

I figured maybe there could be a problem with the power getting to the IC1 so I checked R3, R24, R25, R26 thinking that they could be causing the wrong voltage. I also thought it could be a bad chip but I swapped out 2 other chips and had the exact same sound effect happening as before.

Voltages:
IC1
1 - 4.39V      5 - 4.25V
2 - 4.39V      6 - 3.96V steadily drops down to 2.42V over about 12 seconds, this happens every time I retouch the voltmeter probe to it.
3 - 4.20V      7 -  1.343V
4 - 1.5mV     8 -  8.71V

IC2
1 - 3.86V     5 - 4.35V
2 - 3.91V     6 - 4.35V
3 - 3.91V     7 - 4.35V
4 - 0.5mV    8 - 8.72V

IC3
1 - 4.39V         5 - 4.35V 
2 - 3.86V         6 - 4.35V
3 - 3.86V         7 - 4.3V
4 - 1.5mV        8 - 8.72V

I'll keep messing around tonight but I'm burnt out for now. Thanks in advance for any help. Greatly appreciated.

-Elliot

It says"PHASER" on the board. Has a fdbk and vol control. B10k and B100k pots respectively. The pots are the small green ones which makes me assume it was a 1590G build. It has 3 IC's (8 pin) but all I have are sockets in so far so I don't know what chips go in it. I couldn't find it in the archives or on the main page. My shipping invoice (from 5 years ago) said the item was:
T.Phaser
Item# t.psr

I have it populated except the IC's and wanted to finally finish it rather than throw it out but I can't find the build doc. Not sure where else to look. Thanks for any help you can offer.

-Elliot

Do you mean this one? And is it one which has darker tone than that another? What is that second device type? The same?

Yeah that schematic- Sorry I forgot to post it.

I'm comparing 2 OCD's to eachother. Ones much darker as mentioned. Same schem from madbean. Pretty sure they're even the same board version.

Hi all-
I Love the OCD circuit. I've built quite a few with Madbean layouts. I run two on my board right now. One of them I have is so much darker than the other in terms of tone and I'm wondering why. Looking for insight as to what parts to start messing around with in the circuit- maybe a capacitor got put in at too high of a value adding more low end? Or would it be something to do with what clipping diodes I used in each?

I dime the presence knob (5 O'clock) on my darker sounding one and it has about the same treble effect as the other one does with the presence knob at about 2 O'clock.

You can nearly always sub a non-polarized cap (whether electrolytic, film, mlcc) for a polarized one. Since in this case it's being used as a decoupling cap on the bias voltage, I don't see why it would need to be a tantalum. The trimmer is set and forget.

Amazing. Thank you so much for the insight and expertise!

Hey all-
I'm missing a 0.1uf tantalum cap for a phaser build.
The capacitor is Bias voltage filter capacitor.
The project is this:
https://aionfx.com/app/files/docs/emerald_documentation.pdf

I've never heard of a 0.1uf polarized cap, so I must've overlooked it thinking it wasn't polarized.

Is there any chance that the polarity isn't a must and I could just replace it with a 0.1uf MLCC?

If polarization is a must---I have a bunch of 1uF electro caps. any chance I could wire 10 of those in series to replace this part? Also how much of a difference is it going to make to have electrolytic as opposed to tantalum in this position?

Thanks for the help!

-Elliot

So only works with 9v. Darn. Thanks for the info though.