Glad to hear of your positive BYOC kit experience. Hope you'll have a bunch more!
DSolo wrote:
Things I won't do again...
...select a DC coupler that has to be desoldered when the board comes out. "Internal?" I wasn't sure what that meant when I ordered it.
It's only three wires. I do this all the time. A quick touch of a properly tinned iron tip melts the joint and I just flip the end of the wire out of the solder tab with a small screwdriver. Repeat 2x. Use the iron tip to dab off any solder "blobs" left on the wire ends, and clean off the residual solder from the jack tabs with some good quality desoldering braid (
THIS STUFF is fabulous!). Now you're ready to reconnect the wires when you're done with whatever task prompted you to remove the board in the first place.
True that the "external jack" comes out without desoldering the wires, but I've never liked that protruding treaded plastic barrel. The internal jack looks a lot better to me. Just one man's opinion.
DSolo wrote:
This was my first PCB build, the others were on stripboard. I liked those, because I could follow the schematic. I couldn't really see the traces on the green board, and I felt like I didn't learn as much about the circuit...
The BYOC instructions always include the circuit schematic, and you can use that together with the PCB to see how things are physically connected. The fact that BYOC uses two sided boards makes it a bit more of a challenge, but that's part of the fun. And if you're not into "trace-tracing", many of the circuits have schematics and an accompanying PCB "map" with the components all labeled with their schematic designations available here in the forum. Just look in the list of "stickies" in the applicable sub-forum that type of effect. As an example, you can find many of the BYOC fuzz effect PCB maps and schematics in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=51&t=39386DSolo wrote:
Is there a discussion anywhere about how this circuit works and what function the components play?
Not in any systematic fashion, but if you're curious about how a given effect circuit works, post that question either in the effect type sub-forum or in
Questions about BYOC Products. Might take a couple of days to get a response, but chances are somebody (maybe even Le Grande Fromage!) will chime in.
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