Having connected my power rails correctly this time, I was able to connect an oscilloscope and check to see if it was functioning. Well, signal went in, signal came out. The compression (threshold) knob did appear to influence the level. That was about as far as I was going to get with that.

I assembled all the components and putting things together. Usually I adhere my boards to the back of the pots with a strip of automotive molding tape. It holds much much better than even the heavy duty double sided tape, I've found. Except this time there was a problem. Big gap on one side.

I had previously met a guy, marcus, at the makerspace and he was there working on his violins. I asked if he had any scrap about the 1/4 inch and to my surprise he did. He gave me a piece, I cut an even smaller piece with a hacksaw and used the tape to use it as a riser for the other side of the board. I managed to assemble everything without breaking anything and set of to go home to test it.

To my surprise, it worked mostly as expected. When pushed too far it more or less becomes an overdrive, but there are certainly some functional spots below that. I tested it with the percussion on a casio keyboard I had and it seemed to thicken it up nicely. I also tested it on guitar. It gave some usable tones although certainly more on the agressive side. Strangely enough, there was low enough noise it could be used going into an overdrive.

Knowing that it worked, I ate dinner than started submitting the project, because when better to do an entire project than the very last day its due?