When companies/manufacturers use diy pcb’s

[pucho812]

going over a fancy rack mounted delay and modulator made by a company in England.
any contact with the manufacture would not yield a response let alone a schematic. so pulling the unit, apart I find a pcb with a website address in the silk different from the manufacture of the unit. So sure enough, the pcb is from a DIY PCB site making guitar pedals. from the looks of things all they did was use the diy pcb clone of a delux memory man pedal and stick it in a rack chassis vs a pedal chassis. All parts all values are identical. Was even able to get a schematic from the diy pcb place.

 

[NOON]

Fair enough to make a rack mount version of that circuit if it's a nice one, lazy and somewhat ethically hazy not to design your own pcb for it.

 

[JohnRoberts]

So what exactly is the larger insult? Making a clone of a pedal, or putting somebody else's clone PCB into a rack mount. Neither seems like a good long term business plan. At least you were able to get documentation for the innards.

Back when I sold kits I didn't care what the customers did with them, while mine were novel designs.

JR

 

[ruffrecords]

At least the DIY PCB site/designer is getting paid for the PCB which I guess is a little more ethical than cloning the board. Even so, it sounds like the DIY guys cloned the PCB in the first place which of itself was of dubious ethics. I do not have a lot of sympathy for a cloner who is in turn cloned.

Cheers

Ian

 

[pucho812]

Well it was just weird. I couldn’t find the manufactures website, just their dealer. Sure enough it’s nothing more then build your own guitar fx pcb from some euro website out of Italy.
i think for me the biggest insult so far was using cool audio bbd chips.
cool audio is a uli company

 

[JohnRoberts]

i think for me the biggest insult so far was using cool audio bbd chips.
cool audio is a uli company

I think those Chinese BBDs may be using Matsushita masks, legally or not. Panasonic/Matsushita abandoned the technology that was already being obsoleted by digital technology back last century.

BBD was a cost effective way to make short audio delays back in the 1970s, now not so much.

I don't buy that they exhibit some exotic euphonic distortion but different implementations had characteristic sounds.

JR

 

[pucho812]

For the curious it's a clone of the EH deluxe memory man pedal.

 

[cyrano]

It's not so unusual. I've seen other manufacturer's PCBs in gear from competitors in the industrial sphere. Sometimes it's surplus stock, sometimes it's bought as a spare, sometimes it's a copy that even included the other company's name.

I just bought some COVID tests. Brand name: Siemens. Manufacturer is Chinese, as shown by certificate. Personally, I don't mind, as long as Siemens took care of QC, warranty, docs and distribution and the price isn't exaggerated.

What is unusual, is that they bought the boards from a DIY site...

 

[JohnRoberts]

While this isn't exactly the same subject I vaguely recall one Frankfurt musik messe last century where one major amp manufacturer spotted one of their switching power supply PCBs inside a pre-production prototype being announced by another company notorious for ripping off successful designs. Perhaps they shouldn't have use a clear plexi cover on that one.

JR

 

[gyraf]

..or like the good old EMT245 reverb, where the entire digital-part schematic has evaded me for decades. The math part. Turns out it's originally a military OEM part that does all heavy lifting, no documentation ever given out to anyone

/Jakob E.

 

[okgb]

It must have been a pretty light & empty rack mount case!

 

[pucho812]

It must have been a pretty light & empty rack mount case!

Yes… lot of empty real estate inside

 

[okgb]

Yes… lot of empty real estate inside

Did you take any pix? could probably mount the pcb to the front panel except for spacing out the knobs to make it look bigger.

 

[pucho812]

Still have this unit. It’s not a deep rack but it is 2ru

 

[okgb]

Still have this unit. It’s not a deep rack but it is 2ru

You haven't mentioned names so you don't want to out them? I would mind seeing a couple of pix though, just curious.
I don't think it's cool the amount of diy pcb makers / sellers ripping off commercial designs making profit off of someone else's hard work, I'd call it stealing. Does the world need another tube screamer ? With the saturation it's getting harder to make something " better " so they're getting made " different " another wacky fuzz box.

 

[pucho812]

You haven't mentioned names so you don't want to out them? I would mind seeing a couple of pix though, just curious.
I don't think it's cool the amount of diy pcb makers / sellers ripping off commercial designs making profit off of someone else's hard work, I'd call it stealing. Does the world need another tube screamer ? With the saturation it's getting harder to make something " better " so they're getting made " different " another wacky fuzz box.

I am trying to be nice here. But I have known you long enough in this diy world, that nothing a DM can't solve.

 

[midwayfair]

Many of the DIY pedal sellers explicitly say that you can use their pedals for commercial endeavors. Madbean (who sells a DMM PCB ...) and 1776 used to ask people not to and stopped bothering for instance. I've always told people they can use mine but asked them to use a different name since I (very rarely) build them myself. Not everyone listens so there are, e.g. Cardinal tremolos out there that I didn't build. Some pedal pcb makers even offer bulk discounts for people who want to use the board commercially. I think everyone shouldn't just leap to conclusions that something shady is going on just because you find a DIY board in a commerical product.

Oh, the other thing that can happen is that the PBC is designed, non-exclusively, for someone. I've designed a PCB for someone, gave them the gerbers on payment, but told them I wanted to retain the rights to sell the PCB without mentioning who it was designed for. This worked out for them because my design fees were really low (WAY too low honestly) and worked out for me because I made some extra money on the back end.

 

[okgb]

I suppose some people want to sell more boards period. I can't see someone telling you to not use something which not their design in the first place, maybe the pcb is but not the actual circuit. Back to profiting off of someone else's work.