Linus Learns Analog Circuits

Summary

Random guitar pedal board design Background This is a personal toy project that has gone through several phases, but the common theme has been that it makes absolutely no sense outside of the very specific niche of "Linus is trying to learn random things about electronics". So keep that in mind: there is very little point to any of this to anybody else. Don't expect some great useful guitar pedal experience. I call it my "LEGO for adults" hobby, because this got started when I wanted to extend my traditional after-Christmas activity (which was receiving and building actual LEGO kits, which has been a thing for me since I was a wee tyke) with something else. So for Christmas 2024, I got a new soldering iron and randomly started doing guitar pedal kits. And so over the next month or two, I built at least two dozen kits, and had to literally look for victims to give them away to because I had no use for them myself. Note Of all the kits I built, the ones I enjoyed the most were the Aion FX ones, and if you are looking for a kit build of traditional analog guitar pedals, I can heartily recommend them. The documentation, the customer service, the components, and the enclosures were all top notch. See "Aion FX" Anyway, after building a lot of these traditional analog guitar pedal kits I decided I really wanted to actually understand what they did, because I really had very little experience with any analog circuits. While I've done some very limited electronics most of my life, almost all of it has been related to computers, so it's been either digital logic or power supplies for them. Also, I was looking for a different kind of soldering experience where there was less snipping of legs of through-hole components. I actually like soldering SMT components, but that doesn't tend to be what those guitar pedal kits do. I had done some very limited PCB design with kicad a few years ago, so I decided to just start learning more about analog circuits. And then it kind of grew fr...