In the photo above, you can see both of the PCBs that come with this set populated with the 99 - yes 99 - resistors that make up the circuit (80's synth pop song - 99 Blue Resistors?). You need to be very careful adding the components to this build as debugging a circuit of this complexity would be extremely difficult to say the least.
- 99 Resistors
- 65 Capacitors
- 13 Integrated Circuits
- 9 Transistors
- 8 Diodes
- 3 Toggle Switches
- 2 Trimmer Resistors
- 1 Regulator
- and 1 LED
The above of course doesn't include the enclosure hardware or the wiring.
Just when you thought that the parts count was daunting enough, there are a few other curveballs this particular build throws you. This was one of the earlier Aion FX products, and the bypass daughter boards for the newer products are quite a bit more sophisticated. You'll notice that this product does not include a 3PDT board. It does, however, support two bypass modes - stock and minimalist. I decided to go with the stock mode, but regardless of mode, you need to add jumpers underneath the H11F1 Opto socket (circled in red above). Going with the stock mode meant I could follow the silkscreen, though, so there was that perk!
Wiring up the board itself is also what I would call "non-trivial." I didn't take photos of the wiring on mine because, well, it sort of looks like multi-colored spaghetti, and a lot of it gets buried under the top PCB anyway. However, for the stock bypass mode, the wiring diagram is above. There is also a chart in the instructions that ended up saving my bacon because the drawing was a little unclear on a couple of points. I tend to use aviation grade wire, which is rather stiff and wanted to push the two PCBs (which are connected with male and female multi-pin connectors) apart further complicating the build. However, I just added some insulating material to the back of the upper PCB and simply putting it in the enclosure keeps everything snugly held together. As with most Aion FX products, this one uses a star ground on the input jack. On most Aion pedals, that means you need to bring three wires together there. On this one, there are six!
For the enclosure, I just stuck with the art that Aion FX nicely provides on their website. It looks very similar to the font, etc. of the original and is really simple. To be honest, I think part of the reason that I didn't take as many photos of this one in progress is because I well and fully expected to get it together and it would be a large, non-functional, blue brick. Imagine my great surprise (and outright joy) when I got the case screwed together (as that was the only way to keep the PCBs together!), hooked up the power, and the little white LED came on first try! I still need to hook the pedal up to a signal generator and figure out a way to calibrate it with the trimmer resistors and my oscilloscope, but even "out of the box" the sound is exceedingly cool - as you can see it's actually sitting on my pedal board now. I really like using it with my Electric Mistress clone and Dinosaural compressor build.
Finally, on this pedal you can see my new Steggo Studios badges that new pedals are getting - especially ones that I have Tayda work up with UV Printing. I had several of these made up, and I really think they came out cool. I've recently finished up a couple of pedals for friends (the Vector I built up a couple of months ago and other one that will be the subject of a future blog entry), and I wanted to make sure both of them got a maker's mark!
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