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Mark,
Have you worked your way through the trouble shooting guide? If you haven’t, that would be the best place to start.
I’m sorry, but right now I am very busy and don’t have time to accept any kits to troubleshoot. But if your Quaverato was working for a while then it’s probably not too far away from working again. The noise could be caused by a lot of things. Once it’s working again we can try to troubleshoot where it’s coming from. But for now, start with the troubleshooting guide and see if you can make any headway with that.
Good luck.
-BrachRichard,
His readings were way off. Use the troubleshooting guide voltages for the correct values (found under the “documents” tab of the Quaverato page on our site”.
To use a multimeter to measure DC voltage (all the voltages to measure on the Quaverato are DC) first make sure the meter is set to the DC voltage (V) setting, not milivolts (mV) (if your meter has a “mV” setting).
Put the black probe (the negative probe) on a 0 volt point in the circuit…we call this the circuit “ground” or “common”. You can use the fist pin of the input or output jacks (the pin closest to the part of the jack with the hole for the guitar cable). Or you can use the point on the pcb that the ground lug wire is soldered to.
Put the red probe on the point you want to test. The voltage difference between these 2 points will be given by the meter.
When you test the voltages on the pins of the IC make sure to not be touching 2 pins at once. Place your red probe on the IC pins right where it comes out of the IC’s body. Make sure the depth knob is all the way counter clockwise. That’s the only knob that needs to be in a particular position.
Good luck!
-BrachVery nice! I like how you implemented the dip switch idea, along with the long press foot switch to change the total number of presets. I’m looking forward to seeing how it all comes together in the box. I love watching ideas like this come to life!
I forgot to address the solder shorting out your power jack issue…
Are you sure that the pins of the power jack are shorted together by the solder? This would be very unlikely…the solder would solidify as soon as it hit the board, which would keep it from flowing under anything. I don’t know which pins you found connected, but 2 of the pin are supposed to be connected on the jack when nothing is plugged into it. Try plugging a power cable into the jack (DO NOT plug the other end into the wall yet…we don’t want power in the circuit yet) and then re-test continuity between all the pins on the power jack. Hopefully they are not connected anymore.
You should be able to peel off the solder drop that fell on the board without much problem. If not, send me some detailed, in-focus photos.
-BrachCraig,
I’m sorry to hear about your jumper trouble. First of all, do not use a conductive pen to try to fix this. You need to just bypass the jumper pads with a jumper wire. It appears that you have your iron set to a much lower temperature than you should…i keep my Hakko FX-600 set to 575 F, which is around 300 degrees C. With the temperature set this much higher you’ll probably need to adjust your soldering technique. It should only take you about 1 second or less to thoroughly solder most of the joints on this board (the components with more thermal mass, may take a bit longer…like around 1.5 seconds). I wasn’t able to see your picture that you posted (sorry for the forum limitations) but you may want to re-flow the joints on your board with a bit of added flux (preferably the “no-clean” type).
To bypass JP3, solder a wire from pin 1 on U2 to TP3. Use the thinnest wire you can find. I use “wire-wrap” wire for these types of jumpers…which is either 28 or 30AWG. You can use the wire found in a cat 5 network cable or wire from an old VGA monitor cable…that stuff is usually thin enough, from my experience. You’ll need to tin the ends of the wire first; and also tin pin 1 of U2 (solder the wire to the pin right as it exits the body of the IC). Try to fit the other end of the wire inside the TP3 hole and then solder it. If you can’t fit in in the hole then just lay it across the top of the hole and solder it down…in which case you may want to use a tiny drop of super glue to hold the wire in place on the surface of the board, but make sure you don’t get glue on the solder joint.
If you have other jumper pads that are bad, just fix them the same way. You can find out where the jumpers wires are supposed to go by looking at the schematic in the back of the manual.
Good luck!
-BrachYes, the “hold button” function could operate as a “mode change” switch. Simplified…good thinking!
I totally understand trying to get done with one project in order to move on to the next…I have such limited desk space! But the USB interface will make it really easy to make changes in the future.
-BrachThe Micro seems to be a great choice.
That’s an even smaller enclosure than i was suggesting…that’s great!
One option for making it a little bit more universally usable is to add a dip switch to choose the number of program changes. A 4-pin dip switch could give you the option of selecting up to 16 program changes. I’m sure you’d have enough pins available with the micro. This feature would be nice if you wanted to only use 2 or 3 different presets so you wouldn’t have to scroll through all of them again to get back to the one you wanted.
Another thing you could do…you could add a different mode that toggles between 2 different selected presets when you press the foot switch, instead of scrolling through all the presets. You’d probably need to have a “mode select” toggle switch or something accessible from the outside of the enclosure. One position would be “scroll mode”, the other position would be “toggle mode”. The 2 chosen presets in “toggle mode” could be programmed by long pressing the foot switch (holding the foot switch for more than 2 seconds) when the desired PC number is selected in “scroll mode”…the number would blink a few times to show you that it was captured in memory.
I’m just throwing out ideas. I’m sure the project will turn out really cool. I am very excited to see it when it’s done.
Thanks again for sharing and keep up the amazing work!
-BrachFantastic! Great work! Yes, that is a really good improvement.
What’s most intriguing to me is that it could even work on other pedals that use PC commands to switch presets, like the source audio pedal you mentioned.
I’m sure your code isn’t too big to fit onto a really small microcontroller, like one of the 8 pin ATTiny ICs…That way it could probably fit into an even smaller enclosure like a 1590A…to save pedal board real estate.
I’m very impressed.
I think you may be our most adventurous customer yet!
Good job! Keep us posted on how the rest of the development goes.
-BrachYes, physical pins and Arduino pins are different…the pins in the code are the Arduino pin assignments.
Enjoy tinkering!
-BrachClive,
We don’t currently have a distributor there, but we do ship to the UK. I don’t know anything about your import duty taxes, but we have sent a bunch of stuff to customers in the UK over the years.
-BrachYes, they should work for you just as well as our “roll-your-own” variety. The Quaverato circuit is actually pretty forgiving with what optocouplers you use, unlike the VPM-1 (which is our mod for the Ernie Ball VP Jr.).
We originally didn’t use Vactrols in production because they are hard to source these days. We ended up developing a procedure for testing LDRs that gives us good results and now i prefer our selection process over the ready-made optos.
-BrachOk, thanks for the clarification….and welcome to the forum.
Something is amiss because you need to measure TP1/TP2 and TP3/TP4 while the pedal is powered on. The pedal needs to be off to measure the resistance across TP5/TP6. So if your pedal is not powering on then your reading on TP1/TP2 is not correct.
I suggest following the troubleshooting guide to try to resolve the power issue. It explains everything better and faster than i could type here.
Let me know if you need help on those steps.
Good luck.
-BrachCorry,
That noise is still a misery to me. It is very interesting that it just started happening after you re-soldered the microcontroller pins. This gives me an idea…I know in other high frequency circuits that i’ve worked with this type of issue has been caused by flux (from the solder) on the board. At high frequencies flux can actually be inductive. So i’m wondering if something like that is happening here. The Quaverato is only operating a 16MHz, so that’s not too fast but it may be fast enough for whatever flux you are using to be inductive. Clean off all the flux on your PCB around the microcontroller and the crystal (and associated components). I make my own flux cleaner by mixing equal parts acetone (you can use fingernail polish remover) and rubbing alcohol. I use a q-tip to clean it off.
This flux idea just came to me, so i have no idea if it’s related to the issue, but i hope so. The other times i’ve seen this issue, for some reason using linear power supplies has helped. Using a battery to test if the issue is power supply related is also helpful.
I’m sorry for the trouble. Let me know if you have any luck after removing the flux.
-BrachBrentv,
What do you mean by “I have and overloaded signal for my LPF in the test sockets”? What test sockets are you referring to? And what you do you mean by “overloaded”?
I’m confused.
Did you download the correct assembly manual for the serial number range you have? Did you notice the Note on page 13?
Have you worked through the troubleshooting guide located under the documentation tab on the Quaverato page of our website?
Help me to understand so i can help you better.
-Brach
