The Dimetrodon Distortion - In Miniature!

Last June Steggo released the first original in-house pedal - the Dimetrodon Distortion. In one version or another it's become a permanent fixture on my pedal board able to do anything from overdrive to serious doomy distortion all in one package. I've made a lot of them, but I'd really love to see the pedal really take off and sell at a level that some of the medium-sized boutique makers reach (in the range of 50-100 pedals / year as opposed to 10-20). Given my current time constraints, I'd need to find a way to streamline some of the production of a version of the Dimetrodon to reach that production level (as I don't want to just continually make one pedal). I'd followed a recent release from Supercool Pedals (the Thneed - which is a great pedal BTW!), and that pedal is entirely SMD. Looking at that pedal as an example, I wondered if I could do something similar with the Dimetrodon without sacrificing the tone, so the Dimetrodon Mini was born!

Although I'd laid out several boards at this point, including the one for the Dimetrodon Distortion Deluxe, those had all been laid out entirely for through hole components. I'd never attempted to lay out anything with surface mount devices before, so there was a little bit of a learning curve. Many of the components of the Dimetrodon are normal resistors and capacitors, so it was easy to find appropriate parts to add to the schematic. I was even able to find an appropriate op amp, and some tantalum capacitors so I matched the original as closely as possible. I knew, however, that I wouldn't find the appropriate germanium diodes, so those remain through hole - as is the transistor for the gain recovery stage. The boards arrive pre-assembled apart from those through hole components and then I add those key bits myself from the stocks for the normal through-hole builds.

I built my first prototype (not pictured) using my normal Switchcraft jacks and a separate daughter board for the stomp switch and LED. However, looking at most production pedals (especially those in a smaller form factor with side-mount audio jacks) it's typical to see the audio jacks, LED, and stomp switch (at least) on a separate daughter board. This reduces the amount of hand wiring that has to be done saving build time. The one drawback of most of these designs is if you use the PCB mount audio jacks, the pedal itself is not grounded to the enclosure. Fortunately I'd laid out the main board with several extra ground holes (so I could freely move to different form factors as needed) and I was able to find a ring connector with the correct inside diameter that I could use as a washer for the input jack and wire it to the main board. This grounds the whole pedal to the enclosure.

The enclosure itself is smaller than the normal Dimetrodon Distortion enclosure (hence the "mini") and has a very fun piece of dimetrodon art on the front. This one is licensed rather than one I commissioned for the pedal. If these end up taking off, I may change the art going forward... or I may not - it's kind of cute!

In terms of the sound of the pedal - it's a Dimetrodon Distortion through and through. There may be a slight bit more background noise as compared to one of my top of the line all hand-built through-hole versions, but it definitely holds its own. For this run, I used the Sovtek tone stack, which shifts the mid scoop a bit toward the treble relative to the '75 Ram's Head. It's a really solid build with a lot of versatility. 

The real unanswered questions are purely economic. Is there enough demand to have enough of the populated boards manufactured to sell the pedal at a price point that still makes money. In terms of the labor time, these go together much faster than a through-hole build, but Steggo to this point has been all about 100% hand made pedals, and this goes in a very different direction.

I went ahead and picked up a few prototype boards (to get the cost to something that represented a workable starting point), and a couple of enclosures. The next step is likely going to be a Kickstarter campaign to see if there is enough demand to make it worthwhile to get enough enclosures to finish the prototype run (or more). The campaign is going to be at least a month or two out, but as it gets closer I'll publicize the details.