Ludwig Phase II Clone Tech Notes

[R.G.]

Probably right.

One other question. Which actual brand/type switches did you use? I'm thinking you went to an extra pole for a couple of the LEDs.

I'm trying to pick things which can be found/bought practically everywhere. I have considered going to single pole switches and then PCB relays to do the actual switching. The tough nut is that on/on/on switch for "both".

[Keppy]

Yeah, the 4pdt on/on/on was like $17

I'll check when I get home, but they're nothing special, just a mix of standard toggles from Mouser & Small Bear. In fact, they're probably all from Small Bear, except for the 4pdt which was the series Dino posted and came from Mouser.

[R.G.]

Yeah, the 4pdt on/on/on was like $17

I'll check when I get home, but they're nothing special, just a mix of standard toggles from Mouser & Small Bear. In fact, they're probably all from Small Bear, except for the 4pdt which was the series Dino posted and came from Mouser.

The hard nut to crack is the on-both-on of course.

I think I've found a way to get around that. I think I can use a second transistor on each output of the flipflop, driven through a large base resistor. The switch can be either SP3T or DP3T and be a short-to-ground on the bases of the second transistors, which prevents them from passing on the flipflop outputs. Using the switch as a shunt to ground which inhibits one side or the other, or neither one in the middle lets me use a much cheaper ($3.50) on-off-on switch plus two cheap transistors. I guess even more to the point, using a DP3T center off lets me use toggles with all the same body height, so they can all be circuit board mounted. I'm pretty sure I get all the controls and switches except the footswitches on a single PCB, similar to the original Ludwig console board, but this time there are no wires to the pots and switches. I think there are still 8 or 10 wires to the filter board, but it cleans up a lot of the wiring. To get that, all the switches and pots have to be mountable in the same exact height.

I'm thinking that you used DPDTs on all of them and used the spare pole for the LED, correct?

[Keppy]

3PDTs, actually. The filters are 2-pole to start with. The fuzz & fast/slow can be DPDT with LEDs, though.

It gets complicated if you use bicolor LEDs. I attempted to match the original colors as closely as I could, which led to some weirdness. For example, I couldn't find a red/orange LED for the fuzz switch, so I had to make do with a red/yellow with the red always on. Since the red was brighter than the yellow, that lead required a resistor to ground in addition to the resistor to the common supply. Some of my LEDs had common anode, others common cathode. Some had 2 leads, some 3. The different brightnesses all required different resistor values, too. I actually had to put the lighting scheme on the breadboard before installing it just to make sure it would work.

I probably overdid it a bit.

[digi2t]

Hi guys,
It's been a hectic week this week. Between baseball, and my hard drive crashing ( got it all going again last night), I haven't had time to really check in.

Kep, once again, great job! I was wondering, has anyone compliled a proper BOM yet? I'm gearing up to do the cap refit on my units, but if there is a BOM available, then I won't have to waste my time doing a physical inventory. I'll just isolate the caps on the list, and order from there.

Thanks,
Dino

[R.G.]

3PDTs, actually. The filters are 2-pole to start with. The fuzz & fast/slow can be DPDT with LEDs, though.

Ah. OK. ...rummaging through Mouser...  OK. Can get a 3PDT in the same family of switches as the DP3T on-off-on as well as more normal DPDTs. And they're in the $3-$4 range.

It gets complicated if you use bicolor LEDs. I attempted to match the original colors as closely as I could, which led to some weirdness. For example, I couldn't find a red/orange LED for the fuzz switch, so I had to make do with a red/yellow with the red always on. Since the red was brighter than the yellow, that lead required a resistor to ground in addition to the resistor to the common supply. Some of my LEDs had common anode, others common cathode. Some had 2 leads, some 3. The different brightnesses all required different resistor values, too. I actually had to put the lighting scheme on the breadboard before installing it just to make sure it would work.

I probably overdid it a bit.

Nothing succeeds like excess. 

I was thinking that a single LED would work for everything except the fuzz-both-ffm, where a bicolor would work nicely.

I was wondering, has anyone compliled a proper BOM yet? I'm gearing up to do the cap refit on my units, but if there is a BOM available, then I won't have to waste my time doing a physical inventory. I'll just isolate the caps on the list, and order from there.

I'll tell the PCB program to spit out a BOM.

[digi2t]

I'll tell the PCB program to spit out a BOM

I greatly appreciate that amigo 

Cheers!

[pinkjimiphoton]

me too...i can't wait to build this thing.

today, i start on either the vocalizer, the mouthmeister, or possibly a klon...all the parts came in finally. just a question of which i want to start with.

built a variant of the dunlop jh1 the other day...but twisted it so the "suck" knob is off.

reverse the electro and diode polarity, use a 500r trimmer to replace the 330r resistor, and pop in some NOS GE russian pnp's, and yeehaw, nice sounding pedal!!

sorry for the hijack...lost my mind for a moment there`!

[digi2t]

sorry for the hijack...lost my mind for a moment there`!

No worries bro, we've actually become quite accustomed to your, ummm...."lostness", now.

Kinda like that crazy uncle, that always shows up right around the holidays. 

POKE!

Personally, I'd be interested in the Vocalizer first, since there is no sound or video in exsistance to know what it sounds like.

[pinkjimiphoton]

that'll be a go, then, bro...i will go for the vocalizer next.

i'm bummed...i built most of the klon(e) today....freakin' mouser screwed up and forgot to send me 3 lousy parts i had ordered...

oh well.   two lousy caps and a stinkin' single resistor are on their way. :thu:

i'll start on the vero tonite for the coloursound pedal. 

[R.G.]

Instead of the BOM, I posted the first edition of the revised layout and a BOM. It's up at GEO now, first thing on the "new" page.

I'm sure I did my usual good job on columns of numbers and letters - that is, getting them subtly wrong.    I notice that my software didn't translate "1/4" very well, so "1/4 W" came out as "...W". I'll get that fixed everntually. I still have to get Kep's pictures in there. It's too good not to memorialize.

[Ry]

Time to order parts!  Thanks to everyone who made this possible!!!

[pinkjimiphoton]

looks great, rg!! gonna go over it when i get a little more time, right now i'm preparing dino's vero layout for the vocalizer.
just got off the phone with him, he is one heck of a great dude..you, too, and keppy...

godlyke.

lol

[Keppy]

Thanks for posting that, R.G.! I especially liked the tech review. It's weird to think how much of this stuff I've learned in the past few months.

Anyway, I'm excited to see what designs other people make for this!

[John Lyons]

Good work all! Quite an accomplishment for sure.
Is there a schematic up that corresponds or did I miss it?
Hip hip hooray. 

[Keppy]

Is there a schematic up that corresponds or did I miss it?

Good question. R.G., did you update the one on your site from 2004?

John, the factory schems were posted earlier on another thread, but they're hard to read and we found errors. I'm guessing Geofex will have the corrected one soon.

[R.G.]

I have the first version of the clone "console board" done.

With keppy's panel layout as a guide, I put pots and switches about where he had them, only changing the location to put the centers on grid so they would be easy to locate and drill. Then I started looking up pots and switches. If you put controls on a PCB, you have to be sure their dimensions are compatible, especially if the controls all mount in the same plane. The trick part here is the 3PDT on-on-on  ffm/both/fuzz switch. Keppy used that 4PDT he found. I redesigned the circuit.

I used a 2PDT on-off-on; one pole runs the signals, one runs the LEDs. I used two new transistors driven by the outputs of the flipflop through 47K resistors, and used the signal pole to shunt one, the other, or neither of the bases to ground. That gives center-off being "neither one shut off", or both. Likewise, I ran the LEDs all the time, and the LED pole shunts one, the other, or neither LED to ground, shutting off that side of the red-green bicolor common cathode LED. The flipflop collectors give alternate-phase 0-16V square waves. I put in a 16V zener and ran the new transistors to 16V through 4.7K like the flipflops, so you get the same size signal out of the new transistors as the old flipflop.

I found the necessary DPDT, DPDT center off, and 3PDT on-on switches all in Mouser's catalog, from Mountain Switch, for under $3.5 each. These switches have a PCB-to-panel size of 0.415". No pots at Mouser mount on PCBs and have 0.415" mounting height. However, the 16mm size pots from BI and Taiwan Alpha have bodies that are 0.375" thick from the panel, leaving 0.035" of space; about right for double-sided foam tape. Which was good, because Mouser didn't have any pots which mount by their legs on PCB like I wanted. The 16mm solder lug pots do allow you to use stiff wires soldered into the lugs to go into the PCB though. And they have all the values, I think.

(Um, guys, what are the pot values for the Lo-Z balance and the Bypass balance, really? )

I decided that the footswitches would mount on the case and wires would run to the console and filter board. And that the analog lines to the filter board would come off the console board and footswitches. Also, all the LEDs mount on the PCB.

With all the pots, switches and LEDs spotted on the panel, I sketched out the biggest reasonable PCB for fitting inside the box, and went to work putting parts on the PCB. I reasoned that since it was three or four times the size of the tiny console board from the first layout, no problem running traces.

Wrong-O. It turns out that with so many places fixed in position, it was *hard* to run all the traces. No order or regularity could be exploited and every single part had to be placed and tinkered by hand. It fit - but not easily.

John, the factory schems were posted earlier on another thread, but they're hard to read and we found errors. I'm guessing Geofex will have the corrected one soon.

Good guess. 

[Keppy]

Bypass Balance is 10k, Lo Z Balance is 5k, according to my notes from earlier posts. No one specified taper, but I found audio pots to work well (although I used 25k for the Lo Z pot as I didn't have any smaller log pots).

[R.G.]

Thanks, Keppy. I'll update the BOM.

I got the first pass done of the control panel rehashed for fitting in to a 1590. It's now up at GEO. Give a look and see if it looks OK before I post the toner.

Board is 7" by 3.3", and completely replaces the console board, leaving the same filter board. But now all the wiring to the controls from the console board are on the PCB. Only the footswitches are not on the PCB, and that's because I couldn't find footswitches that fit the 0.415" spacing from the circuit board to the inside of the case.

If it looks OK, I'll also post the drilling guide for locating holes and the toner.

[Keppy]

I'll have to look at this tomorrow night to check really thoroughly. It looks mostly good, but I think it's missing a wire on the bypass switch wiper, and my possibly-faulty memory says the animation footswitch is backwards (ground the switch connection to turn it OFF). The spacing is about what I had though. I'd say the drilling template is good to go!

In case you were wondering, I only put the two rightmost pots on a different level from the others so I could fit in the "formant trajectories" heading, along with the thick silvery dividing line, since I like shiny metal boxes