Also, I’ve seen tons of photos and pieces of art that really interest me and move me on a very deep level, and yet I know nothing of the person who created it. While yes, I could agree that if I DID know about them or knew them personally, it would likely increase my appreciation, and it certainly always interests me to understand who the artist is, where they come from, and what they want to say. But knowing these things aren’t required for me to connect with their art. It generally only enhances the connection the art has already made.

But I disagree that one can dismiss a piece of art outright or even like something without being able to convey why or that, with more time and knowledge, one couldn’t also come to like something more than they did at first.

But once a piece of art, and in particular music and film (which are things i feel like I know a little about), is contextualized I think it can be judged.

And not to belabor, that’s my opinion and I’d like to discuss it more in person with anyone

Apparently the first one uses some pretty high voltages and currents – so please don’t kill yourself if you follow that one. I might not do that one either.

I have heard of R and have been meaning to check it out. I’ll have to give it a go (and finish that darn O’Reilly Statistics book I started reading).

Hope that helps! I’ve just about got the temperature sensor posting to my website – but I’ve been having some power supply fluctuation issues, I think. Another blog post will be following soon on that.

I need to know what type of sensors are available to hook to a PC and then I would like to have a hard out put, i.e. a relay driven output. Example… a drive way sensor that could be recorded on a web site and maybe set off an alarm. Details aren’t clear…. but an example.

To tell you the truth, the Mastodon Dave I’m building is my first pedal. I’m kindof in the same spot as you as far as not really knowing how stuff works. I have a couple pieces of advice though. It would be a good idea just to learn about electronics in general. What a diode does, what a transistor does, how to do some simple circuits. I’ve heard that Getting Started in Electronics By Forrest Mims is really good for that sort of thing. I haven’t read it myself (it’s on my Christmas list), but I do have one of Mims’ other books and it’s AWESOME.

I emailed my other pedalbuilding buddy Ian, because he’s done a lot more research into it than I have. He’s also spent a lot of time looking at schematics and forums and definitely has a better handle on where to start and what resources are out there than I do. Here’s what he recommended as far as getting started:

* Sign up for the forums at http://www.freestompboxes.com and http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/. Between those two you can find probably anything you’re looking for. You’ll have a better chance at finding more boutique pedals at freestompboxes since they have an “anything goes” mentality and diystompboxes has a list of pedals that they will not post information on. For a third website I would recommend http://www.beavisaudio.com or http://www.buildyourownclone.com/board/. Beavis has less tech information, but a lot of awesome projects (you have to really search his site to find them though, kind of annoying) and the other is another message board (i hardly go there). For buying parts, http://www.smallbearelec.com is pretty good.

I’m taking the approach of trying to learn electronics more generally and then how it applies to building pedals more specifically. That way I can use what I learned on Arduino projects and stuff like that.

It would also be useful to have a basic idea about how sound is represented as voltage in electronics, and some basic acoustics stuff. That way, if you know that a diode only allows current in one direction through it, and you know that a sine wave is passing through it, you should be able to think “okay that’s going to get chopped, so you’ll have peaks only (no valleys), and that will probably sound a little more like a square wave. Buzzy.” Another thing that pedals do a lot is slightly overload transistors, op amps, or power supplies (i think they do the last one, anyway. I could be wrong). Each component is going to respond slightly differently when used outside of it’s normal operating range, and that usually means distortion (higher-order harmonics being added to the signal).

There you have it. That’s pretty much the entire extent of my pedal-building electronics knowledge. You may have known all that already! Hope it helps. Post a link to your projects if you have them online anywhere. I’m about to start work on my Mastodon again (I was waiting to get it painted but the artist wife is swamped), so expect to see a post or two here on that.

(edited by matt to remove email address. don’t want my readers getting spam!)