last night. I was so mad. I was mad when i woke up this morning.
DAMN YOU TINY ELECTRIC PARTS! DAMN ATARI PUNK CONSOLE! DAMN!
This is fairly easy to avoid watch what you are doing-in general, in the DIY stompbox case, most of what we have is 9V supplies and 1/4W pots. It is hard to get 1/4W out of 9V, you have to be dropping it through a very small amount of resistance. In order to do that with a pot, all you have to do is hook up the center lug to 9V and a side lug to ground. Once you turn it so that the center and side lug get very close to conneting, you are dropping 9V over a small resistance, yielding a fairly large amount of current, and getting you above 1/4W, so the pot burns. Just avoid this, at all times. Never put directly put one voltage on the center pin and another on the side pin (IE 9V and 0V in this case). Put a 1k resistor in series and your pot won't burn. You really shouldn't need to do this in the first place-to wire a voltage divider, you put one voltage on one side lug and one on the other side lug, so that you have the pot's entire resistance between the two at all times. Can't burn a pot that way (unless you connect a center lug to a side lug!)
-Colin
