DeadAstronaut FX - Astro Flanger

[Strat68]

I started build the flanger but when it gets to installing 9mm pots they won't all fit when correctly oriented.  Either the type of pot I've been using for years are too big or is the board incorrect?




As one cans see these type of 9mm pots, when correctly oriented per pin 1, will interfere with each other and the switched.
Thanks

[ElectricDruid]

Have you got a link to the build guide?

Where does it say that it uses board-mounted pots?

[Strat68]

Good point.  It has holes to connect the pots which match a 9mm exactly to I made an assumption.  I'll just use 16mm ones and wire them which is a pia.  The build doc only specifies the values and not the size. 
Thanks

[antonis]

As countless times said:

DeadAstronaut is notorius for his laziness..

[Strat68]

Thanks for the warning.  I have a couple more to build.

[PRR]

From a random YouTube: https://youtu.be/xSq1T4n_bI0



Pots are on wires.

Those wire are very long, maybe should be shorter?

[Strat68]

The is just no really easy way to wire in pots.  Guitarpcb used to sell boards this way and I stopped buying them for that reason.

[GibsonGM]

There's no REALLY easy way, but it's really not that HARD...   

[Strat68]

Just tedious

[stallik]

Not hard, definitely tedious but with the advantage that you can position the pots wherever you want on the enclosure rather than where the pcb designer thought they should go. Then again, you do have to find an alternative method to fix the pcb in place.

[ElectricDruid]

Just tedious

Totally agree. I'd also add "error prone" and "fragile" to the list. Soldering the pots onto the board makes it practically impossible to wire the pots up wrong and makes it very unlikely that a wire will break off since there aren't any wires for that. You're not *supposed* to mount the PCB by hanging it off the board-mounted pots and if I was building something to go on tour around the world with someone famous, I probably wouldn't...but for the rest of us, it's fine, actually! Honestly, how many times have you seen "board mounted pot gone bad" threads here or anywhere else? It doesn't really happen. Compared to the number of times the pot nut comes loose, the pot spins around when you try and turn it, and it finishes up twisting the wires around and breaking them off*


*...because people mostly break the anti-rotation tabs off because it's easier. If you're going to do that, you instantly lose the right to lecture me about not mounting a PCB on the pots!

[bluebunny]

You could look at the JST connectors ("XH"?) with the 2.54mm pitch.  Solder the plugs to the board.  Then the flying sockets to the pots.  I took this approach with Rob's Abductor delay, which has 58 pots and would otherwise have killed me.  And no, Rob never does board-mounted pots.  It's an astronaut thing...

[Mark Hammer]

My experience is that the smaller the diameter of the pot, the crappier the wiper is, increasing the risk of scraping/eroding the resistive strip to create internal dirt, which cannot be cleaned with spray because the mini pots are sealed.  This, in turn, reduces the usable lifespan of the pot.  Now, IF it is a control one uses much less frequently (e.g., Q adjustment on a parametric EQ), then that may pose little threat to longevity.  But there is a reason why many "vintage" effects are still working well, decades later: bigger pots.

So, from my vantage point - which doesn't have to be yours - providing pads to wire in the pots of one's choice offers up the potential of a longer pedal life.  It's hard to know how much anything we build in 2025 will be cherished in 2050 (or even whether we will be alive to cherish them), but neither did we know that pedals made in the 1970s would be valued as much as they now are.

[Strat68]

I wired the pots and. Ow it just makes a screeching noise even with no external inputs.  But I do have that going for me.

[ElectricDruid]

Ow it just makes a screeching noise even with no external inputs.

Too much resonance? If the screeching sweeps up and down, that's probably it - and it would also prove the clock and LFO are working! If not, it's probably a "basic" oscillation from the output getting back into the input. Check the wire routing, check any components that set gain. A bad joint on an op-amp feedback resistor can often do this since without the resistor properly soldered in, you get the open loop gain of the op-amp, which is enough to create oscillations in pretty much any situation!

HTH