FuzzWon

Inspiration

We have friends who play the guitar, and in our classes we were covering analog filter/amplifier design and thought it would be a great way to apply our skills.

What it does

Amplifies guitar input signals so insanely high it creates a unique distortion sound, to the likes of Jimi Hendrix's performances.

How we built it

Did lots of research into BJT amplifier designs, combined simple NPN common emitter amplifiers to create our desired level of distortion. Modeled a housing in FreeCAD.

Challenges we ran into

Before we started building our design, we used circuit analysis software to predict how it would sound. We could not get the software to produce any output, which made us worry our pedal would not work. However, after building it we were able to confirm that it works.

Our pedal's gain is actually so insanely high it amplifies ANY noise that enters the input. We tried many different methods to eliminate the noise, but it would require a lot of extra circuit elements that we did not have access to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Hearing the pedal work for the first time after not thinking it would work was a celebration for all of us. A bunch of other people in the space could hear it and wanted to come check it out

What we learned

Sometimes its better to just build and prototype the real circuit instead of trying to perfectly model it and make predictions.

What's next for The G-Pedal

We would like to incorporate additional effects into the pedal, such as a phasor effect.

Built With

• freecad
• ltspice