Last year I created an unusual proof of concept of a CoreXY type mechanism intended for use with a 3D printer. Although the initial tests were quite positive, I had concerns about the weight of the overall implementation and was very unsatisfied with my initial designs for the Z stage of the printer. I recycled the parts into the K03 delta printer and let the idea simmer for a while, saving up some extra money for research and...

After much printing of parts, lots of drilling and tedious routing of wiring the base of the machine now looks like the above photo. It now has it’s AC/DC power supply integrated and mounted internally and there is wiring in place for all of the electronics. The next steps are to actually connect that wiring to it’s intended connectors and also to finish designing and printing the new top corner pieces of the frame. This second...

Not much has changed from my previous build, I got occupied for the last week or so with building a new desk while waiting for some JRC386D chips to arrive. I also configured a smaller breadboard host to reduce the necessary desk space required to test my ideas out. Initial tests are showing that the JRC386D IC amplifies far cleaner than the LM386N-1 IC. It can be driven by my previous op amp and FET buffers at full volume without...

A few days ago I was lamenting, in a rambling sort of way, about being unable to get the distortion channel working on my test design. After redesigning and breadboarding the circuit many times I finally came across the core issue – I was configuring the op amp in a non-inverting format which was having unexpected results with the feedback loop. Once I realized my mistake I quickly whipped up a new version. Note that this is an...

In my quest to figure everything out myself, instead of just blindly following pre-designed circuits, I’ve come up with a pretty good clean sounding 1/2 watt power amplifier as well as an effect loop and more recently a switching setup for dual channels using a DPDT switch and some nice tone shaping. For the most part, it’s been about 60% research and theory and 40% just trying things out and learning from the resultant epic...

The design is slowly starting to take shape for my guitar amplifier circuit.  Here is the power amplifier stage with the simple effects loop and the tone stack portion of the pre amp that I will be testing next:   This is essentially the same three knob tone stack found in most big name amplifiers. I’m still working on tweaking some values and have not yet wired this one up. Using the very useful Duncan Amps Tone Stack...