A Dino-Inspired Red Llama!

A little over a year ago I finished up my first clone of the Way Huge Red Llama pedal using the AionFX Yacana PCB. It was a really fun build and is actually a pretty useful little pedal which can be used either as a straight boost or a boost with overdrive (and ultimately distortion). My original enclosure was a very Tongue in Cheek reference to the Disney film The Emperor's New Groove, but I really wanted a dinosaur version to fit the overall Steggo theme. Fortunately my friend Dmytro over at South Obolon FX laid out a version of the board with some additional gain stages like on the AionFX board under the name "Groovy Emperor" (I'm sensing a theme here), and he was kind enough to create a special "Steggo" version of the layout as well!

The South Obolon Red Llama PCB is even more compact than the AionFX version (which to be honest has a lot of open real estate). The build instructions also include the values for the Tube Sound Fuzz version of the pedal, but I went with the vanilla Red Llama configuration this time around. This is an easy enough circuit to where I may play around with it a bit for some future builds. 

For this build I used all modern components. The resistors are all 1% tolerance metal film resistors from Yageo and KOA Speer. There aren't a lot of them, and most of them gravitate toward the high end of the typical spectrum of resistance values seen in a guitar effects pedal - 100K, 1M, 2M2, and even a 10M resistor. Granted some of these are associated with the alternate gain modes, but it's fairly unique in that respect. The two film capacitors are WIMA, the MLCC capacitors are Vishay and Kemet, and all of the electrolytic capacitors are audio grade Nichicon.

I decided to not use a battery for this particular enclosure, though the art is set up in such a way where I could change it around and move to a battery in any future builds. I'm also using the "Steggo" 3PDT boards laid out by Drunk Beaver Pedals. For this pedal I chose not to use the brightness control for the LED and instead went with a fixed 4.7K Ohm current limiting resistor. As there weren't enough ground connections to attach the two audio jacks and the DC jack to the board individually, I went ahead and used a star ground to the input jack. All of the jack connections are insulated with heat shrink tubing.

For the enclosure, I had to search a while before I found a dinosaur mascot that I could use to create some fun reference to the original pedal. There weren't any obvious dinosaurs beginning with the letter "L" that would work for this pedal, so I decided to go with the Spanish pronunciation of llama ("yama"). Granted the Yamaceratops pronunciation isn't an exact match, but it is close enough to get the reference across. According to Wikipedia:

"Yamaceratops is a genus of primitive ceratopsian that lived in Asia during the Late Cretaceous period in what is now the Javkhlant Formation. Initially, the rocks where it was found in were thought to be from the Early Cretaceous, but the age was reevaluated in 2009. It was a relatively small dinosaur, reaching 50 cm (1.6 ft) in length and 2 kg (4.4 lb) in body mass."

Also as it is a "relatively small" dinosaur, I could make a play on the original "Way Huge" brand of the pedal - especially since Way Huge generally makes jokes with their brand and pedal names as well. I even managed to get some fonts that evoke the original.

The sound of the pedal is pretty much identical to my original AionFX build from last year. The normal gain mode gives you a nearly clean boost with additional crunch as you turn the drive knob clockwise. The two alternate gain modes give you a lot of additional gain, but they pretty much render the drive knob inert. It's a fun pedal with an array of uses - especially in combination with other pedals.