gaussmarkov: diy fx

Breadboards are an inexpensive way to check out a pedal circuit. And if you decide to try your own tweaks or designs, a breadboard is the only way to go. I got the one pictured from SmallBearElec.com.

Breadboards offer the circuit builder more freedom to improvise. Because no soldering is required, components can be quickly inserted, removed, replaced, and reused. Often an entire circuit is built up free-style directly from a schematic. Here, I give a breadboard layout of the TS808 clone as a starting place for beginners.

Here is a picture of one of my breadboards from SmallBearElec.com. (Yes, it is a good idea to have more than one.) You can make the photo bigger by viewing it in a new window. As shown, there are five pieces of white plastic laid side-by-side.

Each piece of plastic has holes in it and you can see that the leads of components are stuck into these holes, holding each component in place. Underneath the plastic cover, there are metal clips that grip the leads and that are connected to metal clips in other holes. In this way, the components can be connected together without solder.

The components are also connected together using wires. If you look closely, you can see short lengths of yellow, orange, red, green, brown, and white colored wire running between holes.

The blue in this diagram shows the pattern of the underlying connections on this board: the four large plastic pieces in the breadboard picture above have rows of five holes that are connected together (the columns) and the middle plastic piece has connections running along the length of the piece (the rows).

The thinner middle piece holds the “rails” or “busses” because these connections are often used for things like ground or power supply. On many larger breadboards, such rails often run along the outside of the breadboard as well. And sometimes there are more than two rails running together.

To make all of the connections needed, one connects these groups together with wire that is also stuck into the holes. It is important to use solid core wire for this purpose.

Here is the same photo of my breadboard with labels showing what is actually on it: a tubescreamer, a silicon fuzz, and a germanium transistor checker.

The tubescreamer is the TS808 clone from the layouts page.

The silicon fuzz is Joe Davisson’s Antiquity Fuzz.

The germanium transistor checker is from R.G. Keen’s GEOFEX.

Using Eagle, I layed out the TS808 Clone circuit in breadboard fashion. The blue lines correspond to the connections pictured above. The pink lines represent connecting wires. This is not exactly what is pictured in the photo above, but it is close. The diodes, the transistors, and the IC are all in the indicated positions.

Again, if you right-click on the layout you can open the image in a window where you can make it larger and see the labels clearly. The corresponding schematic is on the layouts page.