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Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the direction you’ll need to turn the trim pots. But it should be pretty obvious if it’s getting louder or softer once you turn it about 10 full turns in one direction. You’ll want to turn it in the direction that makes it louder.
-BrachPat,
I’m sorry for the late response. I just got back in town from the holiday weekend.
You are on the right track with adjusting the tone trim pots in order to get the depth “deeper”. You’ll need to put the pedal in calibration mode to adjust the individual sides (high and low) separately in order to adjust their depth to the maximum setting. Keep the depth pot at max and set the phase switch to “in” while you do this. You may want to start by turning up the high trim pot all the way and then turn up the low trim pot to (tonally) match it….or vice versa.
Remember the suggested 5K trim pot value was only a starting point to ensure the pedal works. The final adjustment (and tonal balance between sides) is done with your ears…so there is no need to use your meter to re-measure the test points.
-BrachOh! Good job finding that! Those resistors are quite different in value (14k ohms vs. 1 million ohms)! Yes, 14k as R1 in the input would have rolled off quite a bit of high frequencies.
I’m really glad to hear it’s working properly now.
Once again, good job finding those resistors, I probably wouldn’t have thought to look in that direction.
Enjoy your Quaverato!
Take care.
-BrachI’m really glad to hear you enjoyed the Quaverato kit! It’s so fulfilling to get that sense of accomplishment when it works the first time you power it up. I hope it gives you years of great tone!
Thanks so much for the positive feedback!
Take care.
-BrachThanks for the response. That tells me a lot.
So if adjusting the tone trim pots fixed the volume issue then that tells me we are on the right track. When the sound is muffled like that, it usually means that the high side isn’t working, or is just way lower than the low side. So first of all put the pedal in “calibration mode” to ensure both the high and low signal paths are working. If the high side isn’t working then follow the troubleshooting guide about what to do in that case. If both sides are working then you’ll need to adjust the balance of the tone until you like it and then use the gain trim pot to make up for any volume lost. Start by turning down the lows and adjusting the highs up most of the way. Then move up the lows until you like the way it mixes with the highs.
PS: Remember, that in order to turn up the highs and lows you’ll need to turn the tone trim pots in the opposite direction that you turn the gain trim pot to increase the gain.
-BrachI’m sorry to hear that your pedal isn’t working correctly.
I’ll need to get some more information from you…
Did it ever work correctly? From your post in January it seems like it started working….is that correct? It’s important for me to know if it ever was working right in order for me to troubleshoot it quickly through the forum without seeing it.
If raising the gain trim pot all the way up didn’t solve the problem then replacing it with a higher value is not a good solution.
How confident are you in your soldering work? My first guess of why this is happening is that something isn’t making a good connection somewhere…especially if the pedal once worked. This type of issue is common when there isn’t enough solder on the joints or if the solder joints weren’t heated up enough to get the solder to flow properly into the joint. So that’s the first thing to check. If you have any questions about your solder joints you can take some (detailed, in-focus) photos of your board and let me look at them.
The next thing to do is to turn up the tone trim pots (both high and low). Turn them up the same number of turns each as to retain the relative levels of each. Turn them up nearly all the way (around 20 turns) to see if that makes a difference. Remember the suggested values in the assembly manual were only starting points.
-BrachVery Cool! Thanks for sharing the photos!
I love the roller-controllers. That looks like a road-ready rig. Great job!
-BrachIt wouldn’t do any harm to have something pressed against the display. But on the other hand, it wouldn’t do much good either (at least on the new model). The 7 segment display is fairly robust and doesn’t get damaged easily. On the older model, where it is just floating in the headers, a clear pieces of acrylic would probably help hold it in better.
That’s my thoughts.
-BrachThe tact switch pins 3 and 4 are just connected to the ground bus, so you can just connect one lug of your arcade switches to your breakout box’s ground wire…don’t even run a wire to the switch’s pad.
Connect the other lug on your arcade switch to pin 2 (only pin 2) of the switch on the board.
When you are holding the board up, with the pots at the bottom, pin 2 is on the top right of S2 and S3. Pin 2 on S4 is the top left pin.
I hope that makes sense.
-BrachThere is a schematic on the second to last page of the assembly manual…that was what I was referring to when I was telling you to look at the schematic. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that my explanation wasn’t very useful. Hopefully this graphic will help…
The green pads are ground (aka negative)
The yellow pads are the wipers
The red pads are 5 volts (aka positive)
So you only need 9 wires total sent to the foot controller: one wire for each pot (connected to the 7 wipers), and one ground wire and one 5V wire. The ground pins on all the pots on your controller should all be hooked together…with the ground wire from the board attached to one of those pins. The same is true for the 5V pins…they should all be hooked together and the 5V wire from the board attached to one of those pins.
I hope that helps.
-BrachThat is very interesting! I love the idea! It’s never crossed my mind to use wheels like this to control pot with your feet, but it looks like it would work pretty well. I guess you just have to make sure you don’t turn them too hard with your feet so they don’t over-turn past the stopping point on the pot. Like Glen said, it would be cool to see it in action.
Thanks for sharing. Good luck!
-BrachI don’t see an attached image. …If you want to show a photo, you’ll need to host the photo somewhere else like google photos and link to it in this forum.
I’m not sure exactly what you are asking, but please look at the schematic at the end of the assembly manual. That should tell you what the sensor pins are attached to. But you should know the only sensors that will work with the Altura are ultrasonic HC-SR04 or similar variations.
-BrachI’m not sure what’s going on with the voltage on R28. Please check pin 17 on the microcontroller for 5V (Google “pinout for atmega328p” if you don’t know where pin 17 is). Let me know what you find.
It’s not super vital that the silencing circuit works; it’s job it to help make the relay click quieter. So unless the sound of the relay click bothers you then you don’t need to worry about fixing it.
Is the gain trim pot set correctly? You should have more than just unity gain with the volume knob all the way up. You might want to play around with the gain pot setting to see if you can increase the volume. If turning it (all the way counterclockwise) doesn’t help, try gently wiggling the gain pot (while playing guitar through the pedal) to see if that makes the volume jump up to a louder level.
-BrachThank you for the photos. Sorry it’s taken a few days to get back to you, i’ve been really busy.
I don’t see anything directly in the photos that I think could be the issue, but i do notice that a lot (maybe most) of the solder joints have about twice as much solder on them as they should have. Please try to re-flow the solder joints with a clean tip (without solder on it) to see if you can remove some of the solder from those joints, and to ensure that everything is making a good electrical connection. As an example of what i’m talking about, look at the solder joints of the relay, they look more spherical instead of the “concave conical” shape they should have. In fact, the joints on the relay could be causing this problem.
I couldn’t tell too well because some of the photos aren’t in great focus, but it kind of looks like there are little extraneous pieces of solder around the top of the circuit board. These need to be cleaned up because they will cause shorts. You can use your soldering iron to pick them up.
Can you please double check to see if R28 has close to 0V on it? If so, please re-flow the solder joints on the ISP pins, because R28 is connected to some of those pins, and they could be shorted or something. If that doesn’t work, then remove C17 to see if that makes a difference with the volume. Removing this cap will bypass all the signal muting circuitry, so you can see if that is causing the problem.
-BrachOh, that’s great!
I forgot that you had installed sockets. I’m glad that you remembered that I said that earlier. Sockets are good for some applications, but they don’t do well with components that deal with sensitive and small signals. I guess it’s a good lesson to take with you in your future projects. You’re right, I probably should mention that in our assembly manual. Thanks for the suggestion.
I’m really glad that you are also enjoying the VPM-1.
Take care.
-Brach
