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Aww man, 40 whole watts?  I'm still using a 15W iron.   

My goal will be to finish off this guitar I'm building, which was meant to be a christmas present, but looks like it's going to go into 2017.  Once that one is finished, my kid wants a new one too, so that's the goal for the new year... new guitars for everyone. 

I started building pedals in 2016, which has turned out to be a fun and rewarding hobby.  Go Team Madbean. 

Quit my long time (15 years) job, found a contract in a small tech company which was good fun for a few months, and now enjoying time off for a few months for school holidays with the kid.  So the later part of the year has been relaxing and a good change. 

Oh, and I bought a new pair of wire cutters the other day.  Using them is like a unicorn is gently caressing the back of my PCB, removing wire with its magical sparkly horn.  It's amazing.  The new cutters make me happy. 

Wow. 

I love the graphics, and the attention to details like putting lyrics on the back.  Very nice. 

That would have to be almost as big as a guitar?  Bolt a neck on it and you're ready to go.

Nice... I love that graphic.

Just got my latest order from Tayda today - it took 9 days to arrive in Australia, which is pretty good. 

Weird thing is that it came via Germany.  Not sure why they would ship from Germany to Australia, rather than Thailand to Australia? 

Maybe Australia being in Eurovision has made them think we're in Europe now?

Ahh, that would explain it.  Getting my Bothans mixed up. 

My kid thought that Princess Leia looked 'too smooth, but her eyes were too sharp'.  He didn't notice anything wrong with Tarkin though. 

I love it when a plan comes together. 

Looks good!

Hah, I was wondering why I found Tarkin a bit odd looking.  I've been avoiding all the press about the movie, so didn't know he was CG.  And yes, the actor died.  That would have been a hint if I remembered that. 

Overall I enjoyed the movie - the thing that weirded me out the most was that there was only about 10 people in the whole cinema watching it.  I would have thought that on the first day of school holidays it would be packed.  Then again, they were showing it starting every half hour, so maybe the later sessions were more busy. 

I liked the new droid, but after a while I stopped laughing at his lines... maybe because I felt like a git laughing out loud in an empty cinema with no one else joining in.  Or maybe the lines were just a little bit forced (no pun intended).

My 9 year old liked it, but he was disappointed that they didn't do the Star Wars writing at the start, and that they changed the music.  I actually enjoyed the new music - I found I was paying more attention to it because it wasn't the usual Star Wars theme in every scene. 

Maybe I missed it, but I was waiting for a line about Bothans... did I snooze through that?

Yeah, label it as 'Not Reverb'. 

In terms of a battery - why not stick in a couple 1.5v coin cell batteries such as LR44?  They're pretty small, and yep, you could simply just use another pole of the 3PDT switch.  That would be much simpler than my transistor solution!

A 3v supply would be enough to power an LED, probably without a resistor needed. 

My approach would be to breadboard it and see what happens.  But that may be a bit difficult, as you have to try it out in a shop somewhere? 

I think it would work, for what that's worth. :-)   If the LED is working at the moment, just at the wrong time, a 'not' gate should do the trick.  Although you may have to supply power to the LED from somewhere else if the relay is cutting the power to the footswitch when you want it on...? Which would mean a battery in your box just to power the LED maybe? 

If the reverb switching works, but the LED is showing the wrong state, I don't think it's your wiring causing the issue.  Sounds like the relay is set up at the other end to send voltage when the effect is off. 

You could get around that by using a transistor to make a 'not' gate, and hook the LED up to that.  That would reverse the state of the LED anyway. 

Hi Joe,

Assuming you use 9v supply, the resistor will be taking 5.8 volts, you want 24mA max, so you'd want

5.8 / 0.024 = 241 ohms resistor. 

A 200 ohm will be super bright.  400 ohms would be nicer I reckon, and yes, you put two in series to do that.  I usually use higher value resistors, as the LEDs these days are super bright.  Even a 1k or 4.7k would be fine I reckon. 

There's heaps of tutorials on the net about how to calculate the resistor needed for an LED - here's one for example: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/219

As for parallel resistors, that's another thing you might want to read up on.  Two 200 ohm resistors in parallel would be 100 ohms total resistance.  More reading:  https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/series-and-parallel-circuits

For the resistor value, R1 is a 'current limiting resistor' or 'CLR'.  It's basically there to make sure the LED doesn't get too much current and burn out the LED.  1k is enough to stop the LED burning out, but still make it reasonably bright.  You could probably use anything from 500 ohms to 10k, depending on the LED. 

I suspect 100k or 200k would be way too much, and your LED would be very dim.  But it really depends on the specs of the LED.  If you've got a breadboard you could stick them in and test the LED + resistor combination before soldering...? 

The wattage, as you mention, won't really matter that much in this case. 

Nice! 

That's some good jack mangling, I must say.

"I like big knobs and I cannot lie,
You pedal builders can't deny,
That when a pedal in a 1590B
Has anodised knobs on it's face
You get sprung..."

...and wow... I just read the rest of the lyrics to that song.  Can't say I listened that closely before!