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Well, I'll have some sympathy for the guy if no one else will.

Imagine building the same pedal, and only that pedal, every day for the rest of your life. You don't have time to build anything else, or experiment, because so many people want to buy your thing. And because you spent so much time getting it right, you're convinced no one else can duplicate your work. You don't have time to release anything else because you don't have the time to dedicate to new projects that you had to devote to your old project. Eventually someone reverse engineers your work ... you've been careful about who you sell to because you have a reputation to protect, but other people aren't, so opinions start to pop up that aren't glowing reviews of the pedal. You see the writing on the wall and you're sick of doing the same thing over and over again, so you give it a rest, and then even more of the clones pop up. Then you go on the forums and everyone's saying absurd things about it and saying really nasty things about you, saying that you're lazy for not continuing to build something that has consumed the last 10-15 years of your life, or saying that you're a ridiculous person who no one should take seriously, and so forth. Why would you go out of your way to make those people happy?

And let's top it all off with you live in a city with a high cost of living, so even a small loss of market share can harm your standard of living, which isn't that good to begin with -- you still live in an apartment, and you're probably not saving much money, either. Even seeing that your pedal has been reverse engineered means that you need to make a decision: Will someone clone my pedal? What if people stop paying my asking price because it's being reproduced much cheaper (say, $62?)? You need to make a decision now -- and you decide that you need to find work without such reliance on a fickle marketplace where you can't compete. So you stop production and start obsessively testing a method of someone else reproducing your product to your specifications. In the time it takes you to do that, everyone and their brother is flooding the market with copies of your circuit, and by the time it takes to actually launch the product, the forum situation has really gotten out of hand and it just seems really stupid. To top it all off, you're not entirely happy with the work the fab house did, so you have to go back to the drawing board.

At what point in that does everyone think it's reasonable for the guy to just go do something else without everyone saying nasty things about them? Or is it just that he gave his opinion in an interview?

Does he have an overinflated opinion of the components in his pedal? Maybe. That could be ignorance -- he's not an engineer, after all. But if he's convinced that the components matter that much, he really does have more experience than anyone else on the planet and certainly has a right to be distressed when other people claim that theirs sounds "exactly the same as" his, when he knows that at least one component is different (whether or not he understands that that component is duplicable).

Even PaulC stopped building the Tim, for some of the same reasons Bill F stopped building his pedal ... and the clone market for Tim-alikes is much, much smaller (even including the Lovepedal nonsense).

Mine are all on a shelf and I have a helpful website with almost every pedal I've ever built on it, with a description of the thing.

But I've certainly misplaced a couple pedals around the house before. Especially when something gets buried under some paper in the workshop or under a pillow on the couch in the practice room.

Next you MUST do Henry V; I'd love to do a St. Crispen's day enclosure <3

Surf-style reverb: Once more into the beach?
Chorus: Oh for a Muse of choir?
ooh, ooh ... looper bypass: The Game's Afeet!

For a customer in Norway.

I used one of the tiny 4PDT rotaries I found recently for the tempo divisions -- I just left out dotted 16ths, because who uses those? It's a little awkward that the Taptation exceeds the PT2399's specifications, so there's a lot of gurgle at the longest delay time setting. Seems like a good call on Jacob's part to move the tone control external for the Hamlet+.




The art came out a bit more impressionistic than I'd originally planned, but it's cool enough I think. He specified some ripples and a blue case and let me do whatever I wanted otherwise.

I don't really know how to measure FV.

Set your multimeter to continuity. Put the black lead of the diode on the cathode (usually has a stripe) and the red lead on the anode. If it says 1, flip the diode (it's backwards). You should get a reading of a few hundreths of a volt. That's the forward voltage drop.

You'll notice that the continuity setting looks like a diode.

Jon: did you use the frequencycentral  layout for the Zendrive or the MB Serendipity?

I built it on perfboard (my own layout).

Nice job on your first 1590A. I like what you did on the switch, too.

hehe "Boo"

Nice work! Did you make the layout, too?

1 4
2 5
3 6

Connect one side of all four diodes to one connection point on the PCB. Connect 2 and 5 to the other connection point. Now connect one diode pair's unconnected side to 4, and the other diode's unconnected side to 3.

Or to put it another way, you only need a single pole on-on-on switch, which is 1/3 the price of the switch you're using.

It's stated to be "bulb driven" on some of their literature...

A white LED looks like a bulb if you squint at it just right. Or if you look directly at it for a couple seconds ... then you can't tell the difference.

What I DID learn is how to learn -- as much as possible, quickly.

This might be difficult to explain, but I hear this all the time from people that have been to university.  What does it mean?

It is kind of difficult to explain, and not everyone gets the same thing out of college for sure. And by no means does anyone need to go to college to be driven to do independent research, self-teach, be interested in learning, etc. My grandmother had an 8th grade education, worked as a waitress all her life, and is the only person in my family besides me who has actually read The Name of the Rose cover to cover.

But I think the reason so many people get that out of higher education has to do with being surrounded by more people who, at all levels, like school enough to pay for the privilege of continuing beyond what is legal required of them, want to do well at something they're interested in, and thus foster a culture of learning. Some people certainly get that earlier than college (I knew high school students who were like this), but I think in college you're more likely to be exposed to an attitude that considers learning for its own sake a good thing.

Lol: 15mA power consumption

On what planet?

90% certain it's a Forum Vibe.

Gut shots:
http://www.jhspedals.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/JHS-Pedals-Warbletron-guts.jpg

So definitely not the Tri-Vibe.

http://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=5326.0

The threshold pot is really only useful if you want to be able to control the compression at different gain levels. The comp pot in the stock afterlife is a gain pot. They aren't radically different and I think the Afterlife is good stock, but some people have liked the extra control.

There's a 100uF cap across the LEDs. You can put a much smaller value on a switch and have a decay control. Or you can solder some wire to both sides of the cap to a 1M pot (variable resistor, lugs 1 and 2) and have a decay pot.

There's probably some way to add an attack control, but it's an LDR so you can only make it so fast regardless so it wouldn't be meaningful.