http://www.beavisaudio.com/bboard/projects/ttb_Valvecaster.pdf
Fortunately for me (and anyone else out there) Beavis has already done a good amount of work with the breadboard layout. Once again if you don't know much about how to layout things on perfboard, then Adafruit's permaproto boards are excellent. In fact, for most all the BeavisAudioResearch projects which are listed on his site you can use either the small or the mid sized Permaproto boards. The small sized board has 15 rows, and the medium sized boards have 30. If you familiarize yourself with the breadboard layout ,then you can easily find ways to fit most of the more simple projects on the small sized board.
But back to the pedal idea at hand... So the Valvecaster may run at either 9V or 12V. I think I'll just stick with the 9V layout since that what has already been planned. A lot of the valvecasters that I've seen online have the tube standing up onto of the enclosure, some with a tube protector and others without. I don't really like that look, it seems like its still one kick away from being messed up, in addition to a problem to store or transport. So instead of a 1590BB enclosure, I've decided to go with the 1590C enclosure, which has the same footprint, but it is a bit taller. I'll use hexagonal offsets to mount the tube socket to the bottom plate of the enclosure and have a hole lined up on the top for which the top portion of the tube can protrude, but hopefully no higher than the other knobs on the pedal. Here are some examples of pedals that I've seen. I like the exposed tube look, but for practicality purposes, for this build I'm deciding against mounting it on top of the enclosure.
Cool glowing tube effect. This is just a small led placed up underneath the tube to make it appear like its glowing, apparently its an older technique to make it look like the tube is doing more work than its supposed to. Obviously not necessarily the case with the blue, but with a yellow or orange LED this might fool some.
The whole drawer handle aesthetic just doesn't appeal to me. Maybe its the choice in door handles, I don't know. But I think if it were more steampunk looking then I'd be more interested.
And then I found this... So it looks like a 1590BB sized enclosure, whereas the 1590C will be roughly 3/4" taller. This one is off of Etsy, wherein the extra knobs are for the tremolo modification to the valvecaster. This is starting to appeal a little more to me, but I don't know about it yet. I ordered some of the parts, but I didn't initially plan on this so I may have to make a tube tremolo pedal at some later time point. I'm concurrently designing the artwork for the pedal, and based on what I see so far, it looks like this pedal is pretty cramped. I don't think I could fit any more knobs on there without it looking too cramped for a 1590C. Its not a matter of space inside the pedal, I could put the switch and knobs on the side, I may try and look over the schematic and allow for some updates to be made to the pedal to accommodate both the circuits.
I'll post more updates on the artwork for this pedal in the near future.
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