Daisy Chain

[AM]

Hi all,

I'm building a small board and I will power it via a daisy chain. I snipped the male connector at the end of the daisy chain and I want to use a DC in and out diy box instead. So, due to pedal spacing, the second barrel of the daisy chain will be connected to the DC out box. Is that creating a parallel 9V path or is everything still running in series? Please see attached image for better clarification.

[GibsonGM]

That's fine, AM...as long as you understand that all of these 9V connections can be seen as coming from ONE wire that runs from DC box "along each pedal", and that at every pedal, you are taking a 'tap' off of it, so to speak.  Like rungs on a ladder.  The main power line will be the ladder rail.  They should ALL be in parallel - that's what you WANT to do.    If you were to serial them, the voltage would drop along the line at each jack.     

Parallel connection will give same voltage along the line, and what will differ is current flow in each branch.

[antonis]

Sir Mike tries to tell you that there should come 4X2 cables out of DC box, each pair of them carrying +9V & 0V(GND) and  individually feed each effect..
(but, despite his excellence in professional painting, he is a terrible and very lazy drawer..)

[GibsonGM]

I like to leave something for the imagination, Antonis!      I cannot do the new person's work for them, no?  As long as he understands that each must receive power in parallel from the power supply, that should be sufficient. 

I had to go out for a trip to town this morning, and it is below zero here.  (-40 C).   So I did not take time for a picture...

[GibsonGM]

This may (or may not) help.  My hands were cold.   Each effect has its own line to "+" and " - ".   You can't run them one to the other (in series)...this way is parallel.
I show 3 effects here, you could add as many as you wish as long as your power brick can output the current required...

[Mark Hammer]

The digital delay is obviously digital, and the tuner likely is as well.  There is a very real possibility of heterodyning and hash noise when daisychaining these 4 pedals.  If so, removing either the delay OR the tuner to its own power source would likely fix things.  Again, that assumes you run into noise stemming from those two pedals sharing a common power source.

People forget that ALL power is daisy-chained.  Every outlet in your home is daisy chained to a common power line, and every home on your block is daisy-chained.  It's all a question of how much effort has been put into preventing interference between devices sharing the power line.  In the old days, if mom used the sewing machine, or the fridge compressor went on, or dad used a power drill in the garage, every audio appliance in the home went to hell until they shut their respective motors off.  So you learned about isolation and preventing power line spikes the hard way.

[AM]

Thanks everybody for the replies.
I tested the pedals and there is no noise.
Here is another, probably better diagram of what I wanna do.
The differerence with Mike's diagram is that FX3 is connected to FX2 instead of directly to the D.C. Box. As I mentioned, I snipped the mail plug at the end of the daisy chain cable and I'm making a little single  DC In and Out box to connect the second barrel to and give power to the pedals. Here is the diagram. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I think in essence this and Mike's diagram are the same, depicting an all parallel connection.

[GibsonGM]

Yes, AM...as long as they are in parallel, it will work....within the constraints of what Mark said above.   What you show is still parallel.   

Factually, you could run one thick wire along each FX, and 'tap it', giving each pedal its power that way (a "bus").  That is how your house is wired...each outlet is in parallel.   Antonis suggested separate wiring runs for more isolation, less chance of noise coupling into the power supply leads.   I see no need for a 'box' of any sort for just the 2 pedals...a property made and insulated splice would work as well.

All I was actually worried about was if you were to try to go "+ to -, to + to -".   That would be series, and is a No No...

[Mark Hammer]

Personally, I like to make what I call a "power distribution box".  This is a simple small plastic box with five or six paralleled 2.1mm jacks; usually one on each end and 4 on one side.    The wallwart plugs into one of the jacks (usually one on the end), and you run short custom-length cables from each jack to the relevant pedal.  The box can also have an LED-plus-current-limiting-resistor between hot and ground to let you know there's power reaching the box.  If you want, you can also stick an electrolytic cap of 220-1000uf between hot and ground for some additional smoothing and "reserve current".

The virtue of this system is that daisy-chain cables may provide far more, or sometimes far less, cable than you really need to reach the pedal power jack.  It can be much neater to make your own power patch cables that are just as long as you need them to be and no longer.  Another advantage of the method is that if you acquire a larger stable of pedals, you can simply make another such box and run a cable from the first one to the second one.  IN other words, so long as the current demands don't exceed what the wallwart source can provide, and the pedals are unlikely to interfere or interact with each other, requiring more sophisticated isolation or regulation, you can use it like a modular system.