Build Your Own Clone Message Board

Just finished up build. LED light is always on dimly and turns on bright when pedal activated. No sounds but loud hiss and squeal. Turned the pots and seem to be changing the characteristics of the squeal. Attached pics. Any help appreciated.
Thanks

The LED uses a mechanical switch so it should either be ON or OFF. Can you post photos that are focused better than these? We can't see the connections for the LED and it's CLR in these. You may also have issues with your soldering but the poor quality of the pix makes it hard to say for certain. Include shots at various angles so we can see what's going on beneath the pots. Post shots that show as much detail as possible.

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"It’s your soldering."

I'll try to get some better pics if I can.

Here are some more pics. About the best I can get our of my camera.

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I'm surprised your LED works at all. You have a 47K (yellow-violet-black-red-brown) resistor for R26 which should be a 4.7K (yellow-violet-black-brown-brown). I would suggest that you go back over all your resistors to check their values.

Some better shots of the solder side of your PCB would help too. We need to inspect the quality of your soldering and none of the shots you provided really show that.

_________________
"It’s your soldering."

I checked all components over again twice to make sure everything is in the right spot and reflowed all the solder joint again just to make sure they were good. According to the instructions downloaded from BYOC the resistor in the R26 location is a 4k7 which is what resistor is on the board and I double checked to make sure it actually is. I also took pics of the solder side of the board. Currently still getting a slight squeal with pedal on and just distortion for the effect. Moving the pots or the switch has no effect. While on bypass there is a very faint squeal.

I know the pics aren't the best but i can guarantee that there are no solders touching other components and all the leads are clipped just above the solder dot.

I don't know what to tell you about R26. I'm color blind so I rely on my wife when I need help with colors and she swears you have a 47K (yellow-violet-black-red-brown) resistor at R26.

Is there a solder bridge across C12?

_________________
"It’s your soldering."

Yeah i know the pic kinda makes it looks red but it's brown. LED seems to be working pretty good now so maybe it was prolly just a bad solder. Effect still is just distortion with some popping here and there. Thanks to all of those who tried to help! I appreciate it greatly! I think i'm hanging this one up.

Dude, don't give up. Get out the multimeter, and do some testing - you'll probably learn a lot in the process, and hopfully find your problem.

If you are getting a dim glowing on your LED when in bypass, how is power getting to it? Check each point along the path. Check for continuity everywhere you should have it (or where you shouldn't). Check for voltage everywhere you should have it. It's frustrating work, but good work to do.

Good luck!

Yeah thanks for the encouragement! I'll give it a shot when i get some free time.

The fact that at one point the LED illuminated dimly when the pedal was switched to bypass might indicate not so much a solder joint that was only making a poor connection, but rather a track to track short. The LED and switch circuit itself is really simple and should be quite separate from the rest of the circuit. Looking at your pictures I can see that the solder joints themselves don't seem too bad, but there does seem to be quite a lot of debris - scabs of congealed flux and little balls and whiskers of solder. I would recommend that you carefully examine your PCB under a bright light with a magnifying glass. Some debris can be cleaned away with a toothpick and an old toothbrush.
Washing the board with a suitable flux remover can also help, although I find you have to use a lot of the stuff to avoid just re-distributing the dissolved flux evenly across the whole board.
Of course any spikes of solder that are firmly attached to joints will have to be re-melted.

If you can get this pedal to work it is really worth it, there are so many sounds you can get out of it - it's much more than just an automated version of the treadle operated wah effect.

Thanks! This forum has definitely renewed my interest in getting this pedal working! Thanks everyone for all the help!