gofar99 Messages: 1990 Registered: May 2010 Location: Southern Arizona
Illuminati (5th Degree)
Hi, I agree completely. I reminded me of a recent issue that sort of relates. A diy builder of a pair of mid size Oddblocks had one that would not start up properly. It would go through the warm up phase, turn on the B+ relay and then immediately shut the relay off. After a lot of checking...it was the routing of a single wire that caused the problem. The B+ wire that was turned on ran parallel to the wires going to the 555 IC. It was spiking the reset and turning it off. Moving the wire fixed the problem. This can happen easily in PCBs. Not nearly so extreme, but problematic. I spent a lot of time assisting an individual with a complicated guitar build that was destined to be a commercial product. The ground traces on the PCB were causing serious hum and noise. Lots of small fixes and the S/N ended up being over 30db quieter. For those of you that might be new to the diy scene, grounding is anything but simple. It is as important as anything else in your project/build.