Owl Pedal Power Problems

OWL OWL Pedal
#1

I use a Strymon Ojai to power my pedals, but I also have a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2+ that I don’t use (too much interference and too noisy) plus many other individual power supplies.

The power requirements for the Owl recommends a power supply of 500mA to accommodate the pedal.

Using an individual power supply works.
Using the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2+ providing only 100mA works.
The Ojai providing 500mA does not work. It flashes red for a second and turns off.

What would be the reason for this, and is there a way to get it to work?

#2

Is the Ojai plug centre positive? OWL requires a Boss-style centre-negative connection. Also make sure it’s DC, not AC!
The power draw of the OWL is less than 160mA, but we recommend erring on the safe side (more mA’s).

#3

Here are the specs:

It is center negative, DC, with 500mA of power.

#4

On the face of it that should work with no problem.
So when you plug it in, the OWL LED goes red? Does it flash three times? If it does it indicates that you’ve entered bootloader mode, which you usually do by holding the button down on start-up.

#5

It flashes red once while I plug it in and then black. Turning knobs and pressing the push button doesnt do anything and no signal goes through.

When I do use its own separate isolated power adapter that works with it, it has crazy loud background noise when not in bypass. Bypass is clean and silent. I made a patch that was just an in->out to isolate the problem and even that had crazy noise when turned on. I even set it to low sensitivity.

Any ideas? I love this pedal and I’m glad I finally got around to start making things in Gen, but now I keep on running into other problems preventing me from using it!

#6

I’d suggest you try first:

  1. do a Factory Reset (in OwlControl, click Factory Reset, then Save to OWL)
  2. update the firmware

If you still have problems after that please PM me to arrange a return.

Martin

#7

I did both and its still having issues, so I may take you up on that, however, I’m still having far too much fun building patches that I’d go out of my mind if I was without it for the duration, so I’ll let you know! Thank you for the offer!

1 Like
#8

Hi everyone,
I’ve been noticing somenthing like this. The behavior is basically what Mark explained but the LED on my OWL sometimes goes off and sometimes stays red. The key is that only happen when I power up the power supply with the OWL connected. If I disconnect the DC jack and connect it back it works.

I read somewhere in the datasheet of the STM that it is recommended to put a 100n cap across the NRST pin and ground because if the power supply raises slowly it can trigger a reset and the thing won’t boot up.
I wanted to try this but I guess I never had time.

Maybe this is the problem.

@markdibarry: could you try powering up your power supply with the pedal connected and see if the problem is regular (to me half the times I do this doesn’t work) and with the power supply on disconnecting and connecting the DC jack? That would confirm that we have the same issue.

OWL pedal power/NRST pin
User Patch Noise Update
#9

Woah! Actually, the opposite was true. I had only tried connecting it when the power supply was already on. I just now tried it by plugging in the pedal before I turned the power supply on and after doing so, it worked! Very weird!

#10

Well… you got me there :smiley: I’ve no idea if it is the same problem.

Good news is my problem seems to be gone, I just soldered a capacitor to the NRST pin and it’s always booting up correctly.