Donation

[alltrax74]

I took (and am still) taking so much from that great site that I'd like to give back, and I guess others also feel like me.
I don't have the skills to help much with schematics or layouts
So Mark, why not considering adding a paypal donation button on the front page ?
I can hardly imagine the time you and mirosol give to us here

Cheers
Denis

[GoranP]

Excellent call, D.!

I do try to help people out in the comments (not that I'm at all knowledgeable, it's just that I've gone through a brick wall or two on my pedal building journey) but sometimes I feel like I take away waaay more than I put in.

I could likely find a few cents left over after I make ends meet once in a while.

[IvIark]

Thanks guys, it's been mentioned before but I've never felt comfortable setting up something for donations, it doesn't seem right to me.  But for those who do want to donate click a few of the ad links that you may be interested in on the main site occasionally.  Then Google can pay something instead of you!

[PStevenson]

I felt that way too Mark but then my friend (also called mark) said just put it there and if people feel compelled to donate good for you, if they don't then it's not like you're going to stop doing it. so I've put one up there what's better though is when people offer to send me electronic bits and stripboard I prefer that much more than money!

there is this blog who periodically puts out posts asking for donations - the blog is basically a guy downloading albums from new album releases and reuploading them on his site - he gets hundreds of dollars in donations and that is for basically doing nothing - he's making money off other peoples music and other peoples uploads. he even uploaded one of my albums!

the way I see it - you actually put time into your blog posts(rather than stealing someone elses post and reupping it as your own) it's something that actually helps people so if they want to donate you should let them

[Geiri]

What if the donation money would be used to buy pedals, that don't have schematics online, to trace? I know there are "tracers" on forums but this could help. This way people are kind of donating to the site and there's a higher chance (& less wait) for something new!

Just thinking out loud here..

[IvIark]

That would be something to think about, although we could really do with someone in the US because we pay so much more for many boutique effects in Europe.

[alltrax74]

Exactly Geiri, the donations could be used in many ways
For example redispatching between we the users a huge order of NOS germanium transistors or enclosures or whatever
We often do this on a lutherie forum, we make bulk orders to save money on big quantities + shipping and then we use donations/suscribtions to dispatch the order to the users
I'm also thinking out loud here, but there are many ways of using donations that could be very helpfull

[iggy]

Interesting discussion. i think asked this at one point as well. Let me chime in with a couple additional ideas.

First, I am in the US so if you need someone to search out items here let me know.

Second, i know you usually do you designs from schematics. Any chance you'd like to have access to a pedal where the schematic is not freely available. Maybe members could send either a tracing or posibly a pedal off to have a tracing made. I'm sure most folks here have a number of pedals that others would love to build. And I would think sending out a pedal for a design study would be fairly inexpensive. Compared to purchasing all these.

I'll even offer up a pedal if you want to do the study. And I'll cover the postage both ways as my contribution to the site.

Let me know. Nice of me to give you more work. Sorry.

[dodido]

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[dexxyy]

But DO all pedal builders invest a lot of time, experience & knowledge in their pedals ( I refuse to call them designs because the vast majority of them are plagiarised from other pedals). This blog is littered with tubescreamer, fuzz face, whatever derivatives, a lot of these "boutique" builders take existing circuits and make minor value changes and call it something else, very few of these guys would build anything at all if they did not refer to other schematics. A lot of the builders that goop their pedals do it more to conceal the fact that they'e basically modded somebody else's pedal rather than to protect some new innovation.

How many patents exist for pedals that have been traced? A lot of these companies are making blatant rip offs of each others work, and doing so unashamedly. If anything I would think that converting a schematic to vero would be less popular among the commercial fraternity than tracing a pedal. More people are able to build a pedal from a published vero layout than could do so from a schematic.

The people that buy these pedals will do so wether the schematic reaches the DIY community in a day or a year, most are blissfully unaware that a DIY community exists, IMO most of the real innovation comes from the DIY community, there are probably more original designs being produced from diyers than from commercial builders.