Though they were designed for use in the new Crown Jewel kit, those little boost modules would be great in a stand-alone boost pedal with the same 2x4 pin plug-in set-up that the CJ uses. A small enclosure with a stomp switch, LED, level pot, I/O jacks, a DC adapter/battery hookup and the plug-in boost module assembly and away you go. But it's not quite that simple, because of the different power requirements of the available boost modules.
Just a simple +9V supply will work for the LPB, MOSFET and Electra boosts, but the other three modules have different power/ground arrangements. The Treble boost needs -9V for the PNP germanium transistor, the 18V JFET boost needs (obviously!) +18V, and the 27V boost needs +18V
and a -9V ground to provide that large voltage range, plus +4.5V for the op amp in that circuit. The boost modules are already set up with the connections for these various voltages through the two 4-pin connectors. But there's still the matter of
providing those various voltages....
It would certainly be possible to get a charge pump and rig up your own circuit to provide the +18V and -9V sources, but since I'm incorrigibly lazy, it occurred to me that this would be a great application for Madbean's little
Road Rage circuit (two PCB's for $4). The only thing left to address is the +4.5V op amp voltage supply, and that's easily done with a simple two-resistor voltage divider off the +9V supply.
So what to connect the Road Rage outputs to and plug those boost modules into? BYOC provides the obvious answer for that, too: one of the new
Experimenter boards! They've already got the correctly spaced connection eyelets for the Boost modules to plug into (see photo below), so you would just need two of the little 4-pin female sockets like the Crown Jewel PCB uses (
not the male ones shown in the photo!). Your various Road Rage voltage output connections can then be made to the Experimenter PCB, and there's plenty of room left to install the 4.5V voltage divider and the LED's CLR, as well.
Now on to the "verification" stage: I've got some Road Rage boards and LT1054 charge pumps on order and everything else on hand, so we'll give this little project a try. Will post more on this in the next week or so....
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“My favorite programming language is SOLDER” - Bob Pease (RIP)
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