Pedal Builder Toolkit

Pedal Builder Toolkit is for people who build their own guitar effects pedals. Every build sits on your bench as a coloured enclosure with its drilled layout, how many of its parts you have, and what comes next. The tools live in drawers beside it.

DESIGN • Gain stage designer: op-amp or single-transistor stage, with silicon, LED or germanium clipping to ground or in the feedback loop. Shows how much signal fits before clipping at 9 V and 18 V. • Tone controls: treble cut, two-knob bass and treble, and mid scoop, with response plots at several knob positions. • Transistor bias for BJT, JFET and MOSFET stages and followers, from your measured hFE, Idss and Vp, Vgs, or typical values. • Clean boost, op-amp and JFET buffers, and low-pass, high-pass and band-pass filters. • Standard E12 and E24 values with a nearest-value table, a schematic you can pinch to zoom, the formulas used, and one tap to send the parts to a parts list, a drilling layout or the power budget.

DRILL • Drilling templates for nine common diecast enclosure sizes, from A-size to DD-size, with the dimensions from the enclosure maker's drawings. Edit any size to match your box. • Place footswitches, pots, jacks, LEDs, toggles and DC jacks on the top, ends and sides. Drag them or type exact positions. • Print 1:1 across Letter or A4 pages with centre lines, crosshairs, hole sizes, 50 mm and 2 in check rulers, and face labels that say which way is up. • Export SVG in millimetres for CNC or laser. • Layout check: holes off the face or too close to an edge or each other, and parts that hit the walls or each other inside the box. • Hole sizes with the range builders report, and your own measured sizes. Powder coat allowance. • Drill chart: fractional, number, letter and metric bits, with nearest-bit lookup.

CALCULATE • LED resistor, voltage divider and bias, RC filters, op-amp gain stages with dB and corner frequencies, Ohm's law • Resistor colour bands, capacitor codes, pF/nF/µF, nearest standard values • Wire gauge: AWG to diameter, area and copper resistance

POWER • Power budget for each output of your supply, with isolated or shared outputs and voltage checks • Battery life estimate • DC jack polarity: 9 V centre negative on a 5.5 × 2.1 mm barrel

PARTS AND BUILDS • Parts lists with batch totals (×N), costs, suppliers and links. CSV import and export. • Stock on hand, shortfalls for each parts list, and an order list • Build log with stages, dates, serial numbers, test notes and photos

WIRING • 3PDT true bypass with an LED, lug by lug, in both switch positions • Input and output jacks, a stereo input jack as the battery switch, and the battery snap • DC jack with series or shunt reverse-polarity diode • Status LED: lit when on, bi-colour or two LEDs, power LED • Buffered bypass, and relay bypass as a block diagram • A/B, A/B/Y and an effects loop • Expression pedal and tap-tempo jacks • 18 V charge pump from the chip maker's datasheet circuit, with the output voltage at your load

ON THE BENCH • Pinouts for TO-92, SOT-23 and DIP-8 parts, taken from named maker datasheets, plus your own • Tone generator for tracing a signal through a build

Every tool has a short guide and ⓘ notes on its fields. Works offline. No account, no ads, no tracking.

Hole sizes and calculated values are starting points: check them against your parts and their datasheets, and on a breadboard. Pedals run on low-voltage DC; the app does not cover mains power supplies.

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