Honey Beest

[Sven]

Hello,

could some one please do a layout for the Bearfoot Honey Beest. The schematic is here http://http://www.freestompboxes.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29376&p=272960&hilit=+honey+beest#p272960
Thank you

[HamishR]

Hey Sven I'm looking at it but it's a bit of a bugger.  I'll get there!  Just for the challenge.

[rocket88]

i got this one. i've got a layout for the honey bee and it shouldnt take much to change it.

[HamishR]

Haha!  Cool!  Tried again today but lost patience.  Looking forward to seeing your layout.  

[Sven]

Great, thank you rocket88 and HamishR.

[HamishR]

Had nothing better to do tonight so finally got my head around this.  Having nutted out the One Control Honey Bee helped.  And I have nearly finished building the Honey Bee so will know if these layouts will work shortly!  I'm pretty confident about this one if the schematic is accurate.

[Sven]

Thank you very much.  I will try it on the weekend.

[HamishR]

I just built this and it works, so it is verified!  I made a couple of changes to the layout so make sure you use the one above and not one you may have downloaded earlier.  Pretty sure the electrolytic cap to Nature 1 should be 2u2, not 22uF like the schematic and that is how I have drawn and built it.  it sounds right to me - I had a Honey Beest a while back.

So at least you know that if you build it as above it will work.  :-)

If you are looking for a smaller board I think it may be possible but I like to keep box caps over 2-3 rows if possible and try to avoid having things span long distances.  Plus it builds easily this way - I fitted it into a 1590B with top-mounted sockets easily.

Good luck.

[GrooveChampion]

Hamish, I am sorry for the nitpicking but this is something that has been bugging me for a while with these kinds of layouts. So here's a question:

If lug 1 of volume, 2 of nature and 2 of gain go to ground, and the bottom row is actually just a ground row, why not connect the grounds of said pots to the ground row?

[HamishR]

If you like to connect grounds to the board there is no reason not to that I can think of.  I come from an amp building background so I'm happy to keep as much wiring off the board as possible!  When I first got into building pedals (because I couldn't afford to keep building amps!) I was surprised to read of people complaining about off-board wiring.

It's been very interesting for me to discover the differences between building pedals and amps.  Layout in amps is a very different discipline - noise is more of an issue and grounding is almost an artform.  It still surprises me that I can can stick parts all together on a vero board and still get a quiet result as long as I avoid ground loops.

So I still prefer to keep as much as I can off-board and almost star-ground to the input socket.  No reason apart from habit.  But in keeping wire length as short as possible etc I have very quiet pedals.  :-)

[GrooveChampion]

Well now that you say it I did read that even in pedals star wiring is recommended for low noise activity.

[HamishR]

There is no one "right" way of doing this stuff.  Just recommendations and personal preference.  I have my own likes - trying to keep box caps to 3 row spacing is one.  They fit into a 3 row space with no bending of leads so that's how I try to keep it.  A gap of two is ok in a pinch because you can hide the bent lead under the cap as long as the cap has space to go in between other components.  Sometimes I have to put a cap over 4 rows and it bothers my OCD.  So when there is a cap and resistor in parallel I never know whether to make the cap go 4 rows or the resistor 3 rows (which I also avoid).  But sometimes these tough decisions must be made.  

[Sven]

Hey HamishR, I have finished my honey beest and it sounds really good.  Thank you for the great layout.