First fuzz - Snap Circuits?

Stompboxes circuits published in magazines, books or on DIY electronics websites.
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dnr101
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Post by dnr101 »

Hi there - this is my first time posting, I've been lurking about for a little while, absorbing as much as I could and last night I took my first dip into this pool and I want to share it here! I had been reading about all kinds of circuits and daydreaming of picking up a bunch of tools and supplies and trying some out when I noticed my son's "toy" electronics kits on the shelf - the Snap Circuits things from Elenco, I believe. So I started looking through the boxes, and what do you know - between the two kits there's two transistors, (NPN and PNP) some LED's and even an opamp, not to mention various resistors and caps! So I found a simple fuzz circuit here: http://home-wrecker.com/bazz.html and started snapping things together. After about 45 mins of snapping, testing, thinking, etc I came up with this:
Image
The red thing at the bottom is a speaker, being driven by the opamp. The crazy thing is, the damn thing works! It's not loud, but there's plenty of fuzz and the tone is... interesting :D Here's a short sample: http://staff.salisbury.edu/~dnraizen/Sn ... apFuzz.mp3 (please excuse the playing... :oops: ) It's a bridge position humbucker with all knobs maxed...
I attached the guitar to the input and ground with duck tape, so the next order of business is to sort some input and output jacks - so I can run it into a real amp, then play around and see what else I can come up with here. I hope this amuses someone else as much as it amused me!
Thanks,
-Dave
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Nocentelli
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Post by Nocentelli »

I like it! The kit looks cool, might get one for my girls (six and eight), since they enjoy "helping" me with my breadboard. Is that a variable cap at the guitar input? They're usually pretty tiny, in the sub nanofarad range: You might get more output and a lot more fuzz with 100n or more.
modman wrote: ↑ Let's hope it's not a hit, because soldering up the same pedal everyday, is a sad life. It's that same ole devilish double bind again...
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dnr101
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Post by dnr101 »

My son got the kit as a present when he was about 8 and he's enjoyed it a lot. Now his sister (7) is starting to play with it a little so I have to say, it's a fun set.I'll have to try a bigger cap on the input - I thought it might work as a sort of tone knob there. Maybe if I put it in series with a bigger cap? I'll let you know how it goes. I got some alligator clips to make attaching my guitar and amp easier, so I want to try out some more designs - I was thinking a tremolo might be fun, I think I found a circuit that I have a reasonable shot at having enough parts for. What other simple circuits might be neat with a limit of 2 transistors, 1 opamp, and three diodes?
Thanks a lot,
-Dave
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