I spent some time on the weekend working on my Orange Squeezer. I had last left it in a position where some strange things were going on and I didn’t know what to do anymore. So this time, I decided to sit down patiently and carefully go through the circuit, shorting the circuit from where I expected there to be signal to the tip ring of the output jack. That way I could find out exactly where things were going awry.
What I found was that right off the bat, things weren’t working. I had shorted the tip rings from the input jack straight to the output jack and had gotten nothing. Now that was strange. Turns out when I tried to star ground my ground wires, one of them (the ground from the output) wasn’t contacting properly. I whipped out the soldering gun and fixed that up quickly enough and I had a proper ground contact. I got so excited during the soldering phase. I was hoping with all my might that this was the last problem and that I’d be able to start working on getting this in the case that’s been sitting there taunting me.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the end of my problems. There’s still an issue somewhere. But I know that I’m now getting signal into the board and I’m set up to do some better debugging. I am thinking that I might have messed something up while doing short tests so I’ll have to spend some more time very carefully following the signal path. I think I know where it’s dying, but I’m not positive yet. I have to say that I am considering giving up on this one, but at the same time, the gauntlet has been thrown down and it’s tough to just abandon it right now. I want to be sure I’ve exhausted my debugging abilities before I do. If I’ve just made a mess of soldering things on the board, I might just bail and order a pre-etched board. But until I can confirm that I’ll keep trying every month or so.
Orange Squeezer
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