Guitar Pedal Ammeter

I need to know how many milliamps my guitar pedals are drawing. Chinese junk to the rescue!

Benchoff

Following Follow project

Liked Like project

Become a Hackaday.io member

Just one more thing

To make the experience fit your profile, pick a username and tell us what interests you.

OK, I'm done! Skip

Similar projects worth following

View Gallery

Description

This is an ammeter for guitar pedals. It has ins and outs that are standard 2.whatever mm jacks. It uses a cheap, off-the-shelf panel mount ammeter found on AliExpress or some other Chinese vendor

Details

It tells you how much current you need for your guitar pedals. Built it with a $5 Chinese panel meter and some plastic.

Files

PedalAmmeter2.stl STL for the case Standard Tesselated Geometry - 311.66 kB - 11/15/2017 at 16:38		Download
PedalAmmeter2lidstl.stl STL for the case bottom (just a flat panel thing, waste of plastic) Standard Tesselated Geometry - 79.32 kB - 11/15/2017 at 16:38		Download
PedalAmmeter2.scad OpenSCAD because OpenSCAD scad - 2.81 kB - 11/15/2017 at 16:38		Download

Project Logs

Collapse

Building the whole thing
Benchoff • 11/15/2017 at 16:37 • 0 comments

Right, so I needed an ammmeter for guitar pedals. Why just for guitar pedals? Because they all have standard center negative, 2.1mm jacks, and they all use 9V. Easy, just buy a panel mount ammeter on Aliexpress:
With that sorted, we need an enclosure. I sized this for the meter, a 9V battery, and two jacks:
Wire up the guts, with the addition of a 9v battery clip and a DPDT switch:
Button it up with some M2 threaded inserts, a bottom, and some labels. Put some velcro on the bottom too, because pedals:
Neat! It's done! Let's test it out:
There we go! Now I know how many pedals I can put on a single output on my power supply. What the hell, Strymon?