Here’s a simple guitar amp that is USB powered. It only has gain control and nothing else. The amp is based on LM386 IC and can only give up to around 200mW when powered via USB. But you can get as much as 700mW when powering it with 9V and using an 8 ohm speaker. There is no volume or tone controls to make the circuit simple but I am planning to to design a USB powered guitar amp with tone controls in the future. But for now, here is the simple version.
Category: Electronics
Korg Nutube – vacuum tube sound in a smaller package
Vacuum tubes are now almost obsolete because they are huge and consumes more power than a typical transistor but many guitarist and audiophiles still prefers vacuum tubes over solid state amplifiers mainly because vacuum tubes have warmer sound. Korg now made a modern vacuum tube which is smaller and consumes less power. Now you can enjoy the vacuum tube sound with just using a battery, thanks to its lower current consumption.
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Simple Current Sensor for Arduino and PIC
Last time I have posted a simple Current sensor for Arduino using only a resistor here in this post. But there are some problems on this kind of simple circuit and they are 1) very lossy due to the big voltage drop on the resistor 2) if you decrease the voltage drop on the resistor, it will decrease the resolution 3) There is a significant voltage drop on the load at higher load current which is not good. The allegro current sensor ACS7xx series is a good alternative but it cost too much for my project so I search for another option. Then I found this ZXCT1008 that is just right for my application.
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Passive Bass and Treble Booster
In most cases, we love to set the bass and treble setting to maximum when listening to music. This gives us a nice sound with bass and treble turned up. Here’s a simple circuit than can be placed at the input of your amplifier to boost the bass and treble. Keep in mind that this circuit is passive, meaning you can’t really boost signal using a passives circuit.
6 Channel Mixer with bass treble and echo controls
This is by far the most complex project that I have posted on my blog. I always wanted to build my own audio mixer but due to limited time I was not able to build anything like this.
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Stereo Tone Control using transistor
Last time I posted about a tone control project using tone control here: simple-tone-control-design/
But that project is only a mono one and you must build 2 to have an stereo channel. So I made a simple PCB design for those who want to build the stereo version. For more information please click on the link above. It is basically the same.
The PCB design is made using Eagle PCB as usual and using a single layer PCB
Download:
MXR Distortion+ project
This is my very first project when I was in college simply because it is simple and the parts are readily available. It can be easily built using breadboard or universal PCB because it only requires few components. It uses a very popular op-amp 741.
Audio signal clipping/peak detector
If you want to have an indicator for your amplifier that tells you that the signal is clipping then this is the one for you. This circuit can be used at the input or output of the amplifier. You just need to change some resistor values to make it work.
ATTINY817 UART with PuTTY
In this article I will show you how to use the ATTINY817 XPLAINED to communicate via UART using PuTTY software. This is very useful when you want to debug your hardware using your PC. This comes in handy if your hardware have no display and other means for human interface.
Simple Guitar Distortion Circuit
Ever wonder how many components is the least you need to build a simple distortion effect for your guitar? The simplest I can think of will need 8 components. This is so simple that you can build the circuit even without using a PCB.