Build Your Own Clone Message Board

And... it's not working. LED does not light up and no signal. battery heats up though. I looked that up and thought there might be a short somewhere. I checked the board and all the solder, while a bit sloppy, was all contained where it should be.

I started checking individual components and I noticed that 4 of the resistors seemed to be way off. 2 of the 1m resistors where ~0.5m the 560K was ~125k and the 150k was at ~118k

Would those values being way off cause the pedal not to work? And am I even measuring correctly? I was checking resistance by touching the exposed metal leads for each component - is that the right way?

Also, with those being off could it have potentially damaged some other components when I powered it up?

Last questions - somewhat unrelated - what is the best way to discharge a capacitor in this scale? A screwdriver across the leads ok?

First off, welcome aboard! (Full disclosure: C.B.N. is a good friend of mine and plays in a band with me )

Ok, measuring resistance- I'm afraid you can't really measure them once they're soldered in to the board (since they are connected to other parts now, the reading won't be an accurate measure of just that one resistor anymore). You could check the resistor stripe codes against the parts list in the instructions at this point. Kind of a pain, I know..

But first, I would take that all-important photo of both sides of the board, plus the off-board wiring, and post that up here so we can have a look. Given your battery is heating up (and no sound at all when engaged), I'm still thinking reversed DC jack wiring could be a possibility. But we'd need to see it.

Discharging caps- Very important in high voltage situations (think: amp building), but I've never even considered the need for that in 9V circuits. I wouldn't worry about that at all.

let me know if you need other shots then these

I think you have the two positive terminals of the DC jack swapped. (I was thinking it was DC jack-related ever since you mentioned the battery heating up).

Looks to me like the middle lug is going to the outer positive pad on the board, and the outer lug is going to the middle lug. If so, unsolder those two + pads on the board and swap them. If it fires up after doing that, then you're buying the next round If not, we'll keep on troubleshooting.

while that may have been a problem i guess it wasn't the only problem. Swapped the + connections and battery still heats up and no LED/sound.

As far as I can tell the wiring of the adapter jack looks correct in your photo. A photo showing better detail of the wires would help.

Several of your solder joints look suspect to me. I'd recommend going back and re-flowing all of them.

The soldering of the SLEEVE lug of the output jack looks really bad. A good solder joint should never look like a blob or ball of solder like that. Fortunately the jack is grounded by it being in contact with the enclosure so it's not a big deal. In fact that wire isn't even needed.

You can mark this one CASE CLOSED!

My pal carbonbasednerd brought this over to my place, and after re-doing the jack wiring and re-flowing a couple suspicious spots, it fired right up! (I think it was the jacks, looked like insufficient heat)

Anyway, I was psyched I could fix this in about 5 minutes- it was my first official 'repair job' for someone else.. if only my own repairs could go so well

Sweetness!!! Nice job PPG!