Cheetos Guitar Amp
Random project for a Saturday afternoon: a guitar amp in a Cheetos Crunchy can. I followed a modified version of Make Magazine’s cracker box amp design, which uses an LM386 power amplifier and a few passive components. The amp has separate crunch (gain) and volume controls, is powered from a 9V battery, and delivers half a watt through a 2-inch speaker hidden inside the can. The whole thing went together in a couple of hours, and most of that was planning how to arrange the parts.
Now I just need to learn how to play guitar.
2 Comments so far
Leave a reply. For customer support issues, please use the Customer Support link instead of writing comments.
Sounds pretty good actually all things considered. Adding an additional pot in there for tone isn’t that hard and add’s quite a bit of variable character to the sound if you wanted more options.
I’ve got a schematic for a distortion box that shows what I’m talking about at http://jeffmhopkins.blogspot.com/2010/01/this-is-for-pena-who-wanted-schematics.html
http://jeffmhopkins.blogspot.com/2010/01/this-is-for-pena-who-wanted-schematics.html
Steve Chamberlin said…
I saw your comment on my BMOW blog about adding an additional tone pot to my Cheetos amp design. Do you have any more info about how your distortion box design works? Looking at the schematic, it’s not at all obvious to me what the two pots do, or what the purpose of many of the components is.
Jeff said…
Hey, sorry, been a while since I looked at the comments section here… need to add an email alert.
Anyway, R9 is a tone pot, it grounds out the active signal through the cap, since it is variable it is adjustable. It is a bit like a subtractive tone dial.
The rest is pretty simple, a few transistors set up for the gain, and the bias set for Q2 via R8. This will vary the amount of distortion.
The switches add a bypass to the box, and of course the obligatory power LED.
If you have more questions, please ask them. I’ll repost to your blog as well.