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I’ll start off with saying that I do not have any experience with building pedals. I figured that based on the impeccable instructions that I might be able to pull this off. It appears that while I have it all soldered together in what appears to be the proper places for the components I am still having a couple of problems.
1)I have to push the bypass switch for 3 seconds and then it flashes a couple of times and engages. It does not matter how I have my knobs turned or what position I have my toggle switches.
2)The tap tempo LED does not pulse at all.
3)I get no tremolo effect at all. When the pedal is engaged it acts as a noisy boost. The volume pot will increase/decrease the volume but that’s about it.I have checked over most of the forums on this and I can tell you that my insulation under my pots is fully intact and there are no holes. When I hold down the tap tempo for a couple of seconds the pattern I get is 2/3/6. I have gone over the solder connections with a magnifying glass(and while they aren’t pretty they appear to be decent connections) I have the microcontroller in its proper orientation. The opamps are facing the right way. I will try to sneak some photos in here as soon as I get a chance.
I don’t really know how to check a lot of the things that have been mentioned in other posts with my multimeter. I just have a cheap centech that doesn’t even have a continuity setting. I’m a super huge fan of this pedal and all the other products your company makes. I can see how awesome you are by how you stand behind your products and how you help out people in the forums. I hope I’m not beyond help. I love the idea of putting together these kits to help me understand more about this side of my playing. Thank you in advance for any help you might be able to give a guy like me!
Michael,
I’m sorry to hear about your Quaverato troubles.
Thanks for trying to upload some photos, but for some reason they didn’t load. Could you please try to upload them again. You’ll have to find an online photo host and then insert the “IMG” link. It would be very helpful if I could see some detailed pictures of both sides of your board.
You say that your solder joints “aren’t pretty”…that’s a good indication to me that most likely you’re issues are solder joint related. Your solder joints should look very much like the pictures in the manual, otherwise it’s very easy to connect things that shouldn’t be connected or to not get good connections where there should be. This is where it is helpful for me to see some photos of your board.
On point #1 above, you mentioned that you have to hold the bypass switch down for a few seconds and then the led would flash and the relay would flip on…are you holding it down as you power the pedal on, or is this after it’s already powered on?
-Brach
I’m sorry, I can’t get those photos to load on snapfish….it just has this blue sun that keeps spinning and won’t load anything. I’ve given it all night to load, but no luck. Are you sure that’s the correct link?…or am I even allowed to see your photos on that site without your login info?
Thank you for the pictures. I don’t know why you said your solder joints “aren’t pretty”. To me, for the most part, they look like the solder joints in the manual. Do you have a very high standard for what solder joints should look like?
Your board is very neat and clean, so that rules out many possibilities of what the problem could be.
Your pedal should only exhibit this behavior when the power is applied and you hold down one of the foot switches. What’s supposed to happen is when you apply power as you hold down the bypass switch for 3 seconds it should toggle the power-on state…either bypassed when powered on or engaged when powered on. Also, with the tap switch…when you hold the tap switch down for 3 seconds while you power it on, the green led should flash the software version. The weird thing is that your pedal is doing both these things while the power is already on. It appears that your pedal is constantly in a state of reset or something.
The first thing to do is re-seat your microcontroller to make sure it’s making good contact with the socket pins. Take it out of the socket and very firmly press it back in until the bottom of the IC is resting on top of the socket.
Also check the voltage of pin 1 of the microcontroller to make sure it is actually staying a 5V at all times.
You can also double check to make sure that the microcontroller pins and all of the pins on the ISP socket don’t have any tiny strands of solder shorting any of the pins together….re-flow them if in doubt.
You can also check to make sure the wiring from the foot switches are not shorting to ground accidentally. Use your multimeter 200 ohm setting (since you don’t have a continuity tester on your meter) to measure the resistance between microcontroller pin 3 and the round pad of the bypass switch port. Also measure across the microcontroller pin 4 and the round pad of the tap switch port. You should get a very, very low resistance…close to 0.
If all these things look good then your microcontroller might need to be re-flashed.
Let me know what you find.
Good luck.
-Brach
