The Armadillo

I'm trying to keep this run of posts going on my earlier projects, so lets move on.

After the talkbox, I decided it was time to move on to something more useful and complex. It just so happened that my 8th grade science project was going to be coming up soon, so I saw the chance and took it.

I had an old phaser pedal that I thought sounded pretty cool, and found a schematic, and went to work. The first approach I tried was with two bread boards and a whole mess of wires. Three tries later, and still nothing. Great.

With that approach ditched, I started making a PCB layout for this thing. that took three tries and help from a local tech (the same one I worked with for a few months) to get the pedal all working. Honestly, after 5 months of work on it, it actually sounded really good and looked cool too. I took third at my school's science fair, and second at the districts fair, which is very good considering that it didn't really follow most of the guidelines. Nobody likes to follow rules, right?

This is the final pedal. The Armadillo, the name branded on all my other gear, was my first finished pedal. Get it? Armbrust. Armadillo. Close enough.
 Its almost 3" high, so its not really realistic to have it on a pedalboard, but hey, it sounds great.

Beacuse of the original Dilla's size, I was prompted to build another similar one down the line a bit. It actually sounds better, has better reliability, and is roadworthy. I expanded the controls too, just for a bit more versatility. I called it the Lil' Dilla.

A month or two after I built the Lil' Dilla, my dad and I decided to do a 'Great Phaser Shootout'. Clever, eh?

In order of awesomeness and how each of them sound: The Armadillo, 90's Phase 90, Lil' Dilla (a *very* close second), 70's script Phase 90. Im happy with those results.

I really should have started with something less complex, but what's the fun with that? The model of learning by taking way huge of a bite has defined how I approach projects now.

.......and I've got this weird obsession with phasers now.......