Stating the obvious

[DryRoasted]

I've been thinking about the krank distortion pedal, and having nothing better to do I studied the picture Battleofmidway posted way back of his.  Like some one pointed out its very similar to Arons smash drive, even down to the (admittedly vey common) tone stack, by looking at the values very handily printed on the circuit board solder mask.  Now the only bit which is foreign is the 2N5088 tranny in the bottom left corner along with alsorted resistors and caps.  Being a cynic I suspect that the krank pedal is basically a simple high gain (2N5088's are high gain trannies right?) booster running into a smash drive type circuit.   Funny old world isn't it?

[Doug_H]

What's a Krack? Never heard of it.

[DryRoasted]

Lol! I Krack pedal is the Krank distortus maximus pedal after a long day at work and not looking at what I'm typing

[petemoore]

  Looks like an engineered for MProduction board with a 386/5088 on it.

[The Tone God]

Autorouted board too. Tsk tsk.

Andrew

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Autorouted board too. Tsk tsk. Andrew

Goes to show, the only time autorouting works, is when you don't need it!
Then again, it might have been laid out by someone on 'krack'..

[DryRoasted]

  Looks like an engineered for MProduction board with a 386/5088 on it.

I'm not implying anything just trying to work it out

[The Tone God]

Goes to show, the only time autorouting works, is when you don't need it!
Then again, it might have been laid out by someone on 'krack'..

Maybe it was a serious caffeine overdose of some newbie EE. Well I never said one could not use autorouters for analog, I just said one should not. The more I look at the board the more things I see that make me shake my head. It looks really unprofessional.

Andrew

[MKB]

Well, it could be a newbie that didn't clean up his rubberbanding.  Traces like that can slip past you if you're not careful.  Also looks like a few parts were moved and rotated and he didn't clean up what was left.  The silkscreen is a bit nasty, some of the characters are rotated in opposite directions.  It mainly looks like he was in a big hurry.  Then again, if the circuit works, his job is OK for the most part.  I remember my first design in OrCAD was a mess, and is still being made after 17 years.  Often EE's are given a design software package and are expected to chuck out pro quality designs with no practice.  It takes a while to be able to make good looking boards, sometimes it is hard to really clean things up if your DRC and boss are both declaring you to be finished.

[The Tone God]

I don't think lack of time would be a good excuse. It would have taken maybe ten minutes to clean up the bad traces. Either the person didn't know what they were doing or just didn't care. If I had received that board I would have rejected it immediately. Maybe my standards are just high.

Andrew

[petemoore]

  I don't think lack of time would be a good excuse. It would have taken maybe ten minutes to clean up the bad traces. Either the person didn't know what they were doing or just didn't care. If I had received that board I would have rejected it immediately. Maybe my standards are just high.
  I'm sure you see what you see, but I'm saying I literally can't, I'd like to understand how to be more picky about when I look at boards..
  What am I looking at that would be bad traces?
  Goes to show, the only time autorouting works, is when you don't need it!
   I figure autorouting 'automatically' makes all the 'top view' cuts, bores the holes etc., and...this is less than optimal for board milling?
  ...I looked at the board and saw what I thought was a totally figured out piece of 'made to be repeated' work!
 

[The Tone God]

What am I looking at that would be bad traces?

Look at the traces that goto R8. The trace the goes past the left side of R8. Above R8 and left of C12. The traces that goes to C1. The trace below J1. I could on but I won't.

Andrew

[MKB]

Well, the component placement looks OK, but those traces pointed in near R8 look like there was some sort of bypass cap in the schematic and on the board, at some time the cap was deleted on the schematic and the change was forward annotated to the PCB, but the traces weren't cleaned up.  C7 is an example of not paying too close attention to the ratsnest and not optimizing the part placement. 

BTW, if you'd like to see another example of a nasty PCB layout, take a peek at the innards of the Fulltone OCD.  Either he was also in a hurry, was trying to make the board deliberately confusing to confound cloners, or he is trying hard to get some kind of performance from the layout that requires it to be as it is.