Mini-taur? Shrinking the footprint of a 1:1 Klon Centaur Circuit
- Ryan
- Sep 22, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 10, 2022
A lot of the circuit boards I've been designing lately have been to address my own needs. One of those is a smaller footprint Klon Centaur pedal. Yes, I could buy one of the thousands available however, I already had the schematic drawn for the BFK so it was easy to create my own 125B-sized pedal by arranging the parts differently. Proudly making things is fun!
My goal with creating a new circuit board was:
1:1 Signal of the original Centaur.
Needs to comfortably fit inside a 125B enclosure.
Thick signal and power traces.
Parts selection for both 1:1 original parts as well as room for more exotic parts selections.
Make the circuit board BLACK.
Improve the grounding and overall manufacturing utilizing 2-layer 1.6mm boards.
Above is an example of using the same parts selection as the original Centaur. Mainly the Panasonic caps, resistor type, op amps, etc.
Build Resources:
Circuit boards can be purchased here
1x 100KB Dual Gang
2x 10KB
For "magic diodes" are germanium-based with a forward voltage drop (vF) of .35v. Buy a few of them so you can measure using your DMM.
I recently bought a bunch of these with good luck finding exactly .35v
Traditional Centaur Component Selection.
The early Centaur (up to mid-silver enclosure) circuits used bi-polar capacitors for C9, C10, C2, and C15. These are green MUSE caps in the BOM.
The later Centaur and new Centaurs use standard electrolytic capacitors for C9, C10, C2, and C15. You can follow the very nice Ceriatone Centura Documentation for circuit differences and even more information on the early vs later circuit differences.
Tayda Drill Coordinates above for their 125B drill service.
The Tone Geek Touch Component Selection
I'm still tweaking what this perfect component selection looks like however every option I'm considering is included int he above BOM.
I don't see the MUSE caps in the Mouser Project page?
Also, which diode should replace by the germanium based "magic diodes"?
Thank you!
Are you going to be doing another run of these?
this come with a faceplate like the valvescreamer?
I’m assuming since it’s a one for one with the original that this is a buffered bypass?
Do you have just an overall part list at this point? I'm thinking about going with all metal film resistors at a tighter tolerance on one build to compare to the larger build with the full-sized PCB.