General Layout Notes

I like to keep things neat on circuit boards. That means no standing axial components, no jumpers (unless I can't help it), and no offboard wiring points in the middle of the board.

Pot numbering follows this diagram:

Switch numbering follows this diagram:

For PCB layouts, square pads can indicate several things:
• Positive side of a polarized capacitor
• Indicator side of a diode
• The emitter of a BJT transistor
• The gate of a DSG pinout FET transistor

 • The source of a DGS pinout FET transistor
• Pin 1 of an IC
• Lug 1 of a potentiometer

Larger pads (square or circular) are for offboard wires or board mounted pots, but I don't always have room to make offboard wiring pads larger.

If you're having trouble scaling a PCB transfer image, check out the Transfer Image Library page for pre-scaled PDFs of every PCB transfer image on the site. All you have to do is download the file and print. The files are organized by brand. Those brands that do not have two or more layouts on the site are grouped together in the "Misc." folder.

Some have asked about off board wiring in comments and emails. While there are a lot of different ways to do this (mostly in wiring the footswitch) and lot of different diagrams and info around the internet on the subject, here's how I typically wire up a pedal when using a 3PDT footswitch.

Blue wires indicate audio path, green wires ground, and red wires voltage.

You may notice the input jack doesn't have a wire connecting the sleeve to the other ground points. If you're using an aluminum enclosure and your jacks don't have plastic insulating the sleeve from the enclosure, the jack sleeves will be connected to each other through the enclosure. I generally double check that with a multimeter, but I've never had that not work.

I've shown the DC jack being grounded via the circuit board (mostly to keep the drawing from getting too cluttered), but you can ground it to one of the jack sleeves if you prefer. Also, I almost never include a 9 volt battery snap in my builds, so I left it out of this diagram. If you want to include one, Google is your friend.

This diagram reflects using an off board resistor for LED status indication. This resistor can vary between 2.2k up to 10k (I typically use 4.7k), so use whatever you prefer there. A lot of the layouts on this blog have a resistor for the LED on/off indicator included on the board. In that case, wire the anode (+) of the LED to the appropriate pad on the circuit board. 

If you're wondering how to wire 2 circuits in one box, it's essentially the same as above, but with the output of the footswitch to the input of the next: