http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=73351.

Actually, star grounding and ground planes are for different uses. Star grounding works best
at low frequencies and as you get into ultrasonic frequencies, you really start needing
ground planes, although you can get by without it. As you get further into RF, ground plane
becomes a necessity instead of an option, and in the higher RF - especially sharp-edged
logic signals - you simply have to have constant impedance stripline traces.

Star is really better for audio, with the exception of when you have a capacitive radiation
source on one side of the PCB that can be blocked by the plane. The point for audio is to
keep ground return currents from polluting signal reference grounds. Star grounding is a
sufficient but more than necessary way to do that; it's just easier than discovering the exact
mix of non-star that's as good. With star grounding you absolutely know what currents flow
on the ground returns, and can be sure that exactly zero of the return voltages from other
sections flow there. In a plane, currents will follow the lowest resistance path, which tends to
be a straight line, but because wide areas of copper can be as low resistance as a single
straight line path, the current actually has a distribution which is humped in the straight line
path and tails off in both directions away from the straight line path. The tail off is pretty fast,
so you generally get away with it, and the overall resistance is quite low, so just lowering the
resistance lowers the interfering ground-current-induced voltages too.

At RF, the inductance of a single trace gets significant, and at some frequency dominates
the resistance. The only way to get low-voltage loss returns at RF is with low inductance
techniques, including planes. Even higher, you have to go for constant impedance when a
quarter wave is comparable to the length of the trace and you can get reflections and
standing waves.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=106524.0

Grounding issues require changing your thinking about electronics and wires.

Wires are NOT zero-ohm highways for electrons. They are low-value resistors.

Being resistors, they generate a voltage in accordance with Ohm's law when current passes
through them. This voltage may be small, but even small voltages can be amplified up into
ugliness when there are high gain amplifiers involved.

There are an infinite number of ways to avoid grounding issues, but only one way that can
be known ahead of time to do that: star grounding, and it's derivatives. All the others require
tinkering and testing for the specific setup.

There are multiple kinds of grounds. One is a shield ground. This keeps the external sea of
electromagnetic interference out. You want this to be your external metal box. Another is
what I call sewer ground. This is the return path for all the "used electrons" going back to the
power supply. Another is "reference ground", a point of zero volts that your circuit uses to
see what those wiggles on the signal line really mean, or a quiet source of zero volts to keep
the opamp outputs standing still, not dancing around in defiance of the signal's instructions.

The current through signal grounds causes voltages that are the sum of the currents
returning back to the power supply. If that's one stage, all is probably well, as this is much
less than the actual signal wobbles in the circuit. If two or more circuits share a sewer
ground wire, the voltage in the sewer ground wire jumps around in coincidence with the sum
of the returning currents. With various signals in the circuits having different phases and
sizes, and with switched circuits like LEDs, this can be a pretty noisy place, relatively
speaking.

The trouble starts when you connect a reference ground to a sewer ground out at the noisy
end. Now the circuit using reference ground to mean "0.00000000V" instead sees its
reference wobbling. Since the incoming signal doesn't see that same wobbling, the reference
ground voltage is impressed on the input as a signal. (Note that "common mode signal
rejection" is the degree to which circuits can ignore this ground dance. It varies with circuits.)
If the circuit has little common mode rejection, the ground noise is amplified. High gain
distortion pedals can amplify it a lot. If this causes perturbations in the ground current,
perhaps after another few pedals up the gain some more and perhaps change the phase a
bit, you can get the ground noise being amplified and feeding itself - an oscillator.

If you think about it, the way to keep the voltage across a resistor (including a wire!) down to
zero is to make the current through it zero. One good way to keep the reference voltages
clean is to not let current flow through them, and that can be done by running a separate
reference wire from the circuit back to the circuit One True Ground point. This one idea is the
seed from which star grounding grows.

For simple transistor circuits for which separating reference from sewer ground for that one
circuit is not possible, limiting the currents on sewer+reference ground to be only that circuit
is almost as good. Any errors from sewer are merely a reflection of the circuit's activity itself,
and not in a way that causes oscillation. For circuits which can be setup to have differential
inputs and which have high common mode rejection, you can use the ground from the
incoming signal for a reference, and only the actual signal vs ground will be seen, and all will
be well.

We generally get away with incredibly bad grounding practice in pedals because they are
small, close together, and use small currents in an isolated way. Setting up a looper with
many pedals invalidates that.

And now I'm finally back to your looper.

If I were doing this (and I have before ) I would do a couple of things. First, decide where a
One True Ground will be. This can be the power supply ground, output plug, some place.
The actual place can be one of several ones, as we'll see. Isolate every single input jack
from the case, to allow you to run a ground wire from the jack to the circuit it serves. This
keeps any currents on the case from being cross-injected into the circuit inputs. Connect the
case to the One True Ground point, and connect no other wires or connectors to it. Now the
case is an RF and mains hum shield, and no other currents can flow in it. It's a pure shield.

Connect the power supply ground on individual wires from the power supply ground return to
each circuit, one per circuit. In your case, this is just the LED's, and they don't have any
"gain", so you can run one wire from the power supply to all LEDs. But keep this "ground"
away from your signals. If you run a ground wire to the switches/LEDs, do not connect that
ground wire to the send/return jack grounds except at the One True Ground. Isolate the
signal-handling wiring on the switches from the LED-switching parts.

Finally, you're probably using a single external power supply daisy chained to the external
pedals. This constitutes an external ground path in parallel with the signal reference ground
on the send/return shields. The right way to do this is to shield the cables only at the pedals
and use the power ground connections as reference ground, but that carries sewer ground
issues of its own.

So there... it's a step toward understanding, and not a solution. You did ask.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=100148.0

Let's make a distinction between what should be done and what one can often get away
with.

What one can usually get away with in guitar pedals because of the small size and low
power/current involved is to just connect everything up to the conductive enclosure, power
jack, battery, and circuit board any kind of way. The currents are so low that the voltage
drops from the wire and case resistances are also low and don't cause problems. This is
where most pedal makers' knowledge of ground starts and ends until they hit a harder case.

However, as input impedance on the pedal gets higher, gain gets higher, and frequencies
get higher, this becomes less and less true. There comes a point where the gain is big
enough or big enough at a high enough frequency that you get oscillation, noise, or silence,
indicating the circuit is oscillating massively above human hearing. Also as frequency gets
higher, the self inductance of wires becomes important. Up in the FM radio band, a wire
longer than half an inch or so is not a wire - it's more an inductor.

So how it should be done is:

1. The input jack sleeve should be connected to the enclosure right where it punches
through the enclosure. This can be done by just the screws holding it into the box, but as
noted paint, and eventually just dirt and time will make this not so reliable. This ought to be
done with a star/toothed lockwasher under the fixing nut to bite into the enclosure metal for
long term reliability. This makes the input ground a solid RF/shield ground to bleed incoming
RF from the wires into the surrounding enclosure and keep it out of the circuits. This can
also be done with a small ceramic cap of maybe 0.001 from the input sleeve right to the
chassis if for some other reason you don't want to - or can't! - DC-ground the input sleeve
right there. The cap leads have to be as short as you can possibly make them to be
effective.

In the ideal case, this connection to the chassis at the input jack should be the **only**
conductive connection to the chassis.

2. The incoming DC adapter jack and battery leads, etc. grounded sides should not connect
to the chassis where they come in or elsewhere. They should run directly to a point on the
circuit board where traces split out to power the circuit.

3. The input ground should connect to the circuit board ground right at the input circuitry.

4. The output jack should be isolated from the chassis, and a signal ground wire run from its
sleeve back to the ground common point on the PCB. This way, only output signal currents
run through that ground wire. Hooking its ground to the input jack ground terminal forces
both input signal currents and output signal currents to flow in the same wire resistance. This
makes an explicit shunt feedback loop around the whole pedal. As long as gain and
impedance are low enough, it doesn't matter, but when you get enough, it oscillates from the
feedback.

5. The input jack should not be wired for the input-power switching trick by using a stereo
jack and running power negative to the ring terminal. This forces 100% of the power supply
current for the whole pedal down the input signal ground wire, and the currents used by the
circuit are fed back into the input. When current, gain, and/or impedance get high enough,
this can make it oscillate. The output jack is a better place for this, as the currents are higher
and it's not automatically a feedback issue. But it does risk putting signal out on the output
line for the next pedal. The best way to do jack-based power switching if you want to do it is
to use a bipolar transistor to switch power and a resistor from its base to the stereo jack ring
terminal. This can only contribute a DC offset, and a very small one, instead of a signal.

6. LED ground returns should go either to the place power is brought onto the board from the
power jack or back to the power jack. This keeps the large-ish current changes off the signal
reference ground wires.

I'm still running a bit of fever as I type this, so if some of this is foggy, I apologize.

One can often get away with just ganging it all up. When you can't get away with it, it may
help to know what's theoretically best

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=91073.0

So, I should put all my reference grounds on 1 path to the star GND and my sewer grounds
on another path to star GND???
It's a matter of the currents. References generally don't source or sink much current. For
instance, a JFET gate is referenced to ground through a 1M resistor, and its internal
resistance is much higher than that. Same for a JFET input opamp. It's (+) input has an input
impedance of many megohms, so it's fine being tied to a reference voltage through 1M, or
more. Very, very little current flows through these grounds, so they could in theory be
connected together, especially for the opamps which internally reject a lot of power supply
noise. JFETs, on the other hand can't reject noise because their sources can be moved
around because of source current through the source ground lead. It's probably better for the
JFET to be referenced to its own source "ground" and have one wire from that go to star
ground. The opamps can (usually!) share a reference voltage. What you DON'T want is any
of these to be connected to, for instance, the ground return from an LFO that blinks an LED,
or an LED switching circuit, because that would impart a voltage across its sewer-ground
wire to anything that uses that same ground wire. So separating the grounds from anything
that eats a lot more current than the input references is a good idea. Can they all be ganged
together? It depends on how big the resistance of the wire is and how big the currents are. A
classical mistake in building power amps is to bring the speaker ground return back to the
power amp. That one has BIG currents, and must go directly to the main star point all by
itself to avoid contaminating what it touches. The higher the current that flows, the more it
needs its own wire.
Quote
...So these 2 paths will meet at the Star GND point, right?...
A "perfect" theoretical star ground has one wire to the star point from every component
which connects to ground. It's impractical to wire that way, so usually, one ties all the
grounds from one circuit section which does one function together. The grounds may contain
a contaminating voltage, but it winds up as a feedback voltage which does not usually
change function much. That means that there's a local star, perhaps after a two-device
preamp section. These local stars have one wire each leading back to the main star point.
It's less ideal, but massively better than just glomming them all together.

Yes, all grounds go back the main/master star point.

Quote
Also, where should star GND be,... This is what I'm still unclear of, since my input and output
jacks are not isolated from the steel front and back plates of my wooden enclosure.
This gets near to meditation and religious revery sometimes. There is ideal perfection, which
is guaranteed not to cause grounding problems. Then there is pretty good, and causes no
problems, even if it's not perfect.

Ideal is one single point to which all the ground points connect. It is best if this point is
completely unconnected from the chassis. Once the circuit works with no connection to the
chassis, a single wire is connected from the star point to the chassis. This forces no currents
to flow through loops in the chassis, which then serves only as an electro magnetic shield.
Again ideally, the only connection to chassis should be the ground sleeve of the input jack,
and all others isolated from chassis. That's usually impractical, but it's the theoretical best.
What is usually done is to connect all the jack grounds to chassis. This sets you up for hum
and oscillation if anything goes wrong, but people get away with it often enough that it's
become the standard because it's easy and mostly works, especially if no high current
returns, like speaker returns flow across the chassis too. The AC power line safety ground
wire must connect to chassis too, but it connects at its own point, not used for anything else.

The master star point has coming to it the wires from local-star collections of ground, and
also exactly one wire to chassis, exactly one wire to the power supply ground, usually a filter
cap terminal. That same filter cap terminal which connects to the star ground through one
wire has connecting to it only the single wire to star ground and one wire from the
rectifiers/transformer. That wire from the transformer/rectifiers carries the high current pulses
in the rectifiers, and must not share any conductor in the rest of the grounding net. It's
currents go in and out of the first filter cap, and can add hum that is impossible to get rid of.
The single wire from the filter cap terminal to master ground carries (in theory!) only DC, and
it certainly does not carry the rectifier charging currents. The wires to chassis and rectifiers
are very special cases, as is the speaker return, because of the high currents. You can be
sloppier with others until it gets you into trouble, as everyone usually does. Then they turn up
here saying "My sadjfklsas oscillates!" or "My uyaureiop hums and I can't make it quit!".

Quote
if I have a steel plate chassis in the front of a wooden enclosure that gets grounded from the
input jack and a separate steel plate on the back of the same wooden enclosure being
grounded by headphone and speaker output jacks, this is also where my 2.1mm power jack
(isolated from steel) is located as well???...
Unless the currents are quite small, that's asking for trouble.
Ideal (I think... I have to ponder this stuff out too, and I make mistakes on it a lot) would be to
take one ground wire from each isolated chassis section to the master star point. For the
input side, that can be the wire on the ground side of the input jack. It would be better if the
output jacks were isolated from chassis and carried their own wires back to the master star,
or all but one are isolated from chassis. The power jack should be isolated from the chassis,
and wires taken back to the master star point. This is a common disaster in making a
univibe/neovibe, because the AC in cannot be connected to ground, so using an uninsulated
power jack causes massive hum.

Quote
Can I make a small copper plate cut out of 22AWG copper sheet to be my Star GND
point?...
Yes. However, it really ought to be isolated from chassis, and have one and only one wire to
chassis from it.

I originally tried the circuit without the chassis, jacks and pots in the air...So is it really
necessary to isolate the headphone and speaker output jacks from chassis?...Since my
jacks are the metal switchcraft jacks, this will be kind of hard...Can't I have my back steel
plate chassis being grounded by the speaker output jack to star GND, and from the speaker
output GND will connect to headphone jack GND, so only 1 wire would be grounding the
back steel chassis, since the DC jack is already isolated from chassis and will connect
directly to star GND as well???
Maybe. That's the problem with grounding. Star grounding can be shown to be a sufficient
answer in all cases. It cannot be shown that something else can't be made to work, or that
the gain of the circuit is so low that it won't matter. In your case, with only outputs on the
back panel (speaker and headphone) and no inputs, you may be fine.

I guess another way to think of it is that star grounding is sufficient in all cases. However, it
may not be necessary in all cases. There may be simplifications which work as well, or
90...95...98% as well, depending on what is where and how big the currents are. If you can
afford to dink with it for a couple of weeks to get it right with a custom ground buss or
chassis grounding, you may not have to have star grounding. But if it simply has to work
perfectly first time, every time, star grounding is a way to get that.

However, do worry about safety grounding. For safety reasons, you really should connect
the front and back panels with a thick braid of wire or metal that will conduct lots of current -
the safety test is 25A last I remember - so that if the AC power line gets loose and touches
either one, it will pop the fuse and not the connecting wire. The safety guys think it's better to
not be dead than not hear hum. Sometimes this makes hum removal harder.

Quote
...Why can I GND the front chassis with the input jack to star ground and not the output jack
with back chassis, which is actually a separate piece of metal, so it is isolated from the front
steel chassis....
That's because the chassis really should be continuous for safety ground/shielding reasons,
and the Rules say, only ground the chassis at one point. People have been getting away
with grounding things everywhere to the chassis for decades. And it is that: getting away
with it. Current prefers to run where the impedance is lowest, just like people prefer to walk
on paths instead of cross country through the bushes. It's easier. So if the chassis has the
inputs on one side so any chassis current flows to the ground point in the middle and does
not combine with current flow from the speaker outputs on the back and get shifted around,
you get away with it.

So: can you use the jacks to ground the chassis plates? Sure. To the degree that they
isolate high currents and sewer ground returns from inputs and references, you will get away
with it. Do be sure to worry about that safety ground current thing, though. That means you
may have to use 25A capable wires to your speaker jack and input jack which ground the
chassis, and use star washers under the jack nuts to ensure a bite into the chassis metal.
Otherwise, there is a potential (sorry... ) shock hazard.

Quote
Also, should I be using very thick solid core copper wire for my paths to Star GND?...Is
18AWG enough or do I need thicker than that, or would stranded wires be alright?...Thicker
wire will make it harder for me to connect to my stripboards etc......
Actually, the wire can be as thin as can be guaranteed to not get too hot to make it easier to
wire. The nice thing about star grounding is that the wire size matters less, because you're
not trying to keep voltage drop in the wires low by simply glomming on more copper. For
things in the range of a few ma, use thin stranded wire. For speaker wire, use 22ga to 18ga.
The extra resistive drop does not cause problems because only that particular circuit sees it.
For AC power wiring, go massively for safety in current carrying and insulation voltage.
Quote
I should've just stuck to making pedals, but I want to know more...Thanks for your time R.G.
Actually no, you should not have. You're in the uncomfortable position of having conceived
something that needs made that you don't ...yet... know how to do. I personally have
adopted that as a life style for my entire adult life. I know how to do more cra... er, stuff
than you'd believe. I'm a firm believer in the quip that a monstrous mind is a toy forever.
Finding oneself in the position of needing to learn to get the next whatsit designed and
working is a delight.

http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=104399.0

Bottom line is that you have a built pedal. It NEEDS to have a V- and V+ input or else it will
not work. So, by this process, doesn't that mean that ALL of the "grounds" in the pedal
HAVE TO EVENTUALLY got routed to the POWER ground?
I mean... its not like the pedal is being fed with multiple Ground options. You have a power
adapter (be it a wall wart, battery, etc) and these only have (1) V+ and (1) V- right?
I just dont get why ALL of the grounds WOULD NOT be tied together to the V- coming from
the source
They are eventually connected together, but exactly HOW they're connected together
matters; don't get discouraged, this is a slippery subject.

First, wires are not wires as most people think of them. They are really, truly, no-fooling
simply low-value resistors. Experimental superconductors aside, there are NO connections
without at least some resistance. The only difference is how much resistance. Some "wires"
have 1M between their ends. We use these for pulldowns. Some have 1K between their
ends. We use these to limit currents in LEDs and transistors. Some of them have 10 ohms
from end to end, and we use these to confuse the competition. Some wires have 100, 10, 1
or 0.01 MILLI-OHMS from end to end, and out of frustration at the difficulty at measuring the
voltage drop across these last ones, we say "oh, they're all short circuits" and smile.

But the fact is, all wires are different. They all have different resistances, inductances,
capacitances, and so on. So the only way there is ever 0.0000000000... volts across a wire
connecting two points is when the current is equally zero. Georg Ohm said. God told him.
They're all different.

So how do you EVER get two different places to have the same voltage? Only two ways: (1)
you move them together so they're no longer separated by a wire/resistor or (2) you force
the current between them to be zero. If the current is zero, there can be no difference in
voltage between two points connected by a conductor. One really good way to make sure
there's no current between two points is to connect them with one and only one wire.
Electrical current flow requires a loop to flow in, and if there is no current loop made with
conductors, no current can flow through the conductors, so there voltage between the points
MUST be zero.
So - all wires are resistors. Any current flow makes a voltage across them. If you want two
voltages to be the same, there can be no current flowing between the places the voltages
are.

Power comes in at a power jack (as DC, usually, for pedals) or as AC to be rectified. If it's
rectified, there are large, discontinuous pulses of currents set up to charge the filter cap, and
so the wire from the power-in jack is polluted with these pulses, as is the wire from the
rectifiers to the first filter cap (which is assumed to be so big that it eats most of the pulses
and makes what goes out into smooth DC.) If you attach anything in your circuit that needs
to be a quiet place of "ground", like the ground lead of your input jack, then it needs to attach
to either the circuit itself and not to the enclosure or filter cap, or to the filter cap "common"
point only. This is a reference point, and the currents are going to be very small. Your circuit
may pull a lot or a little current, and that can be a continuous, non-varying current or it may
wobble like the devil with signal peaks. If it wobbles, it needs to be returned to the filter cap
common by a wire that does not include the input voltage reference, or the wiggles on the
wire caused by the current and wire resistance will cause your input to think the wire-voltage
is part of the signal, and amplify it.

The limit in the extreme is star grounding; everything that could possibly have a ground
symbol on it gets run to the filter-cap common by its very own wire. Now the wires cannot
cause shared voltages from the currents in the wires, because they all have their own wire,
and so they cannot pollute one another. This obviously gets ugly if there are lots of points to
star ground.

The limit in the opposite extreme is plane grounding. In plane grounding, one covers the
entire circuit (metaphorically!) with a bedsheet of solid copper in hopes that (1) the total
resistance is a lot lower because you've used so much copper and (2) that the currents will
wend their merry way across the copper plane in ways that don't insert ground return
voltages into the signal. This does work very well at RF, where the electromagnetic fields of
the signals force the currents to flow under the signal wires going the opposite way in the
loops. It works less well at DC and audio where the field component directing the current
flows are less strong.

I'm just running on about some grounding issues. The central idea is that all wires are
resistors, and you have to pick and choose what currents run in what wires to make things
be quiet. If you are doing small circuits and low currents, the induced voltages may be so
small you can ignore the grounding issues. This is how most pedals work.

These issues are why I periodically post about what a bad idea it is to use the input jack for
carrying all the current from the battery negative to the circuit. The stereo jack trick works
and people get away with it under the "small circuits and currents" exemption, but the higher
the gain and the higher the current, the less good running all your power supply current
through your input signal ground wire becomes.

Quote
Was this a typo/boo-boo? Reading this makes me wonder... "How is the CIRCUIT going to
be powered if the incoming power supply (V+) ONLY goes to the first filter cap and ONLY
there?
What ANR said - one wire goes from the power in to the first filter/bypass cap. Then another
wire goes to the circuits, or they all cluster there if you're star- or semi-star-grounding.

Quote from: Govmnt_Lacky on September 17, 2013, 09:23:47 AM

What I dont understand is WHY anyone disputes that ALL grounds in a circuit inevitably end
up being tied to POWER GROUND.
Whether it be signal ground, power ground, or sewer ground....... it all only has ONE place to
go in the end in order for the circuit to work. The POWER GROUND that lies on the wall wart
plug or the battery.
Otherwise.... wouldn't it just be a floating ground that is not connected to anything
No one disputes that. It's just a slippery concept to talk about with words only and not
pictures. Yes, eventually everything does get connected to power ground, and all the "used
electrons" get back there or nothing would work. The points being raised are just to
emphasize that the PATHS the current takes have consequences, but they all do go back to
the electron-pump that makes them flow.