Boss Blues Driver with a Ukrainian Dinosaur - For a Good Cause!

When Russia began its illegal and pointless invasion of Ukraine in February, I posted a "yellow and blue" pedal I'd recently finished - my first Boss Blues Driver - in solidarity with the Ukrainian people. Later on I donated Ukrainian Army BMP serial number 2 to the Pedals for Ukraine charity auction on Instagram. That pedal did very well, raising $260 for relief efforts. I ultimately plan to build more of those, but I wanted to do something a little different for a second Pedals for Ukraine donation. Something more dino related, so I hit the web looking not only for dinosaurs native to Ukraine, but I also wanted to come up with a fun pedal to put into said enclosure! Given my first "blue and yellow" pedal was a Boss Blues Driver, I thought that may be a good place to start.

My first Boss Blues driver pedal was the standard model. However, I'd recently finished up the Galaxie mod of the BD-2 pedal, and thought it would be nice to create something sort of unique for the auction, so I dove in and populated a second AionFX Sapphire board! As with all of my recent builds, this one includes high-end metal film 1% tolerance resistors, metal film capacitors (KEMET and WIMA), Nichicon electrolytic capacitors, and genuine Toshiba through hole 2SK184-GR transistors.

The wiring follows the normal AionFX recommendation for grounding with a star ground to the input jack. I'm using ribbon cable to connect the 3PDT daughter board to the main PCB. The hookup wire is all 22 Gauge aerospace grade wiring. The LED is a golden yellow color to go with the blue and yellow theme of the overall pedal. 

As it turns out, there aren't a heck of a lot of dinosaurs that have been discovered in Ukraine. The most interesting is an ankylopollexian dinosaur called the Riabininohadros. So it became the name of the new pedal. Unfortunately at some point during the graphical manipulation, the spelling of the dinosaur's name got somewhat mangled. Hopefully that won't depress the bidding, but I guess I could offer to replace the enclosure as I'm getting close to making a new Tayda order...