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philosophy

I designed the beavis board to make it easy for you to learn about the dark magic arts of stompbox circuitry. To do that, I looked at all the problems I had seen before in my own circuit-building attempts, the litany of questions on the DIY forums, and the loads of email questions I get at Beavis World Headquarters. Most of the problems are centered around a few key areas:

• Problem 1: Learning Soldering Sucks: Yes it does. That’s not to say it isn’t an essential skill that we all should have, but it shouldn’t stand between you and initial hacker success. Soldering is a bit of an art, and the more you do it the better you’ll get. But it is a sometimes steep learning curve. And even if you know how to solder, there are lots of times when you just want to prototype and tweak things without dealing with soldering.
  
  The beavis board solution: No soldering required! (But you should still learn to solder…)
   
• Problem 2: Breadboards can be a hassle! Yes they can. Breadboards make it really easy to stick components into and prototype and experiment. But they are really ungainly to work with. You have to stick a jack somewhere into the board for your guitar. And another for your amp. Then you need to dangle on a battery clip. When you get the whole mess working, you’ll move your guitar and the input jack falls off the board. Plus, your circuit ends up as a breadboard with a whole bunch of stuff hanging off it—what happens when you want to move your creation over to your pedal board or amp to see how it sounds in your rig? Arghh, that’s a nightmare. Finally, unless you wire in a 3PDT switch, there is no bypass for your creation so you can’t readily experiment with levels, interactions with other stompboxes, and all the other things that you would do with a normal pedal.
  
  The beavis board solution: the integrated I/O breakout box gives you a rock-solid metal enclosure with input and output jacks, a power jack, 3PDT true-bypass switching, a voltage sag knob and a switch, all ready to go.
   
• Problem 3: Parts Sourcing Blows! Yes it does. It took me two years to understand enough about parts to order the right thing. I have boxes full of strange surface-mount (SMD) capacitors and pots with 12” shafts, and all sorts of other unusable bits. This is because there are literally millions of parts in a huge bewildering array of configurations and sizes. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from people who get excited about a project, order parts, and end up with the wrong stuff. Of course, we get exactly what we ordered—we just don’t always do a good job of ordering what we really wanted. Don’t feel bad.
  
  And part value is another hassle: how do I know what capacitors to have on hand for various projects? What is a good set of transistors for general stompbox usage?
   
  The beavis board solution: A great collection of resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, ICs and other assorted parts that gives you the bits you need to build a lot of cool circuits.
   
• Problem 4: Schematics: WTF?!?! Yes, WTF indeed. A lot of times, folks want to try a project and get a schematic only to be confounded by what to do with that schematic. Do I put that on a breadboard? If so, how? Or do I use a veroboard layout? How do I do that? What about etching boards? All I really want to do is build something that works!
  
  The beavis board solution: a hacker’s guide that shows you both the schematic and how to lay it out easily and quickly on the breadboard. You’ll be surprised how much schematics can make sense as you work through the projects and see both the schematic (abstract) representation and the breadboard layout (physical) representation side-by-side.