AMZ Mini-Booster in an Old Clock

What time is it? Time to play the geetar!

I recently built a version of the AMZ Mini-Booster based on the vero board layout on Guitar FX Layouts (best blog ever, and quite possibly the reason the Internet was invented).

It looked like a very quick build (I was determined to finish it in one go), and I had most of the parts on hand, but I did not have a small enclosure. However, I did have an old digital clock that stopped working, and I had set it by my workbench intending to take a look at it sometime. It wasn't the perfect size, but it was on hand and it had a battery compartment. 

I removed all of the clock's innards and glued in place all of the buttons (snooze, hour, minute, etc.) that had been held in place by those innards. My super glue was hardened and useless, so I used Gorilla Glue, which expands when it dries, hence the mess.

I drilled two holes in the back for input and output, two on top for the switch and level knob and wired them all to the little vero board held in place by stiff wires coming from the pot. I put the battery in, and it was ready to go.

Sounded good (see video demo below), and I ended up selling it on ebay for $30. The enclosure is pretty sturdy—fine for home, but I doubt it would last long at all under regular stage use.

If I were to do a similar project again, I would drill another hole in the top for the LED. I was trying to be clever and have it shine out through the display lens, but the LED wasn't in a great location and the red plastic is darker than I thought.

The pot, switch and jacks were all salvaged. Poor choice of glue.

Battery compartment already built in

Ditto Looper Pedal: LED Color Blind Mod

Click on image to enlarge

I was recently asked to replace a dual-color LED in a TC Electronics Ditto Looper pedal. The person requesting the change has a variation of color blindness that prevents him from distinguishing red from green, and those are the two colors in the Ditto's LED. I chickened out pretty quickly, though, and never even opened the Ditto to look. I didn't feel like frying something and being stuck with $130 non-working pedal. Instead I came up with a solution that did not risk any damage to the pedal and did not affect the pedal's value or warranty.

I had some 3-D glasses on hand (Red and Blue) and cut the lenses out. I cut two little squares—one of each color—and stuck them side-by-side on a piece of tape. I placed the tape over the LED so that the line between red and blue was right in the middle of the LED. Green would have been a better choice than blue, obviously, but I went with what I had on hand, and this seems to work well as is.

Because the red lens makes the red LED brighter and the green darker than it would be ordinarily, and the blue lens makes the red darker and green brighter, when the LED is red, the left half of the lens lights up. When the LED is green, the right half lights up.

There are surely countless ways to make this solution look better, but this quick, cheap and easy solution works in a pinch.