The Boards Have Landed

The prototypes of the new PCBs for the Ronsonic Diesel Drive Buffer have arrived. They look good, very good. I'm building them up now and am already planning improvements for the production version.

It's funny you look at a schematic on the screen for months, study and craft the circuit board on screen and on paper for weeks and then you get the thing in your hands and improvements become obvious. The good news is that there are no errors to correct, only improvements in layout and assembly.

The Electric Guru and Hero boards are also in. These are a lot nicer than the original builds. I'll be assembling a couple of single and dual pedals to go off in a couple of Tour Boxes I'm planning. So be ready for the announcement.

The next couple of posts will discuss some of these pedals in a general way, the various types of buffers, history and use of treble boosters and like that. So stay tuned for some pedal geek goodness.

New Circuit Boards On The Way

Big news on several projects.

The big project for the last couple of months has been preparing the new Diesel Drive Buffer for production. This is the monster buffer project that I described previously. The original target price of $100 is now deemed hopeless, too many compromises would be necessary to get there. It would still be a better than typical product, but why do "better" when "awesome" is within reach. This does not use your usual twelve cent transistors or fifty cent ICs; it is all top shelf parts all the way. And this is an application that will reward the investment.

The order has been placed with the board house for prototypes of the new circuit board. They will be here in a couple of weeks and we'll get this thing off the breadboard and onto the pedalboard for some serious workouts. It's very hard to demonstrate a buffer pedal in a recording of video, but I've got a few ideas about how to show what this beast can do.

I am also revisiting a couple of classics. The Hero Overdrive and Electric Guru Treble Booster are also getting new circuit board designs. These boards will both speed production and produce a more reliable pedal. None of the existing pedals have had any circuit related failures, but these will just be that much more robust.

Thanks for checking in, I'll keep you posted on any new developments.

On the Drawing Board - The Buffer

Got a couple of projects in the works I'd like to talk about a bit.

First, is the new buffer. This is actually a triple buffer designed to go onto a pedal board and fill all the buffer / driver / splitter needs anyone might normally have. The basic idea is, guitar goes in, there's a separate, isolated output for the tuner. This keeps the tuner off the signal path, some tuners are tone suck disasters, even when used in a branch off the signal path. This fixes that problem. There's a buffered output to the pedals, and a return. Then another buffer to drive the line to the amp.

Here's the jacks:
Guitar input
Tuner Out
Buffered Out to pedalboard.
Return from pedalboard.
Buffered Out to amp.
The stomp switch can be internally selected to either mute for tuning or bypass the pedalboard.

Technologically, this thing is a monster. It runs well on 9VDC, and even better at 18, and is safe anywhere up to 24 Volts. It uses some very serious modern IC technology instead of the usual buffers and antique opamps you see in other pedals. The dedicated Tuner Out uses a typical FET buffer stage since we don't really care what the tuner sounds like, we just want to isolate it from the rest of the signal path. Truth be told, you could run the Tuner Out into an amp or pedal and it wouldn't sound any worse than the other buffers on the market.

The design challenge now is developing this pedal to the point that we retain all the features in a compact format. Yes, this all fits in a standard "MXR" type box. And, I'm trying to keep the price under $100! as low as possible, right now we're looking at $129. There are other pedals with similar features, they are larger and vastly more expensive. Oh, except none of them give you the option of having a mute or bypass switch.