Drill Battery Power Supply for Guitar Pedals

I made this drill battery power supply a couple months ago and it has worked great so far. The battery lasts a really long time, like over 10 hours with 4 pedals on when I tested it. I bought all the parts on Amazon, I already had the batteries and charger for my drill and already had the daisy chain to connect the power to my pedals.

Supplies

Drill battery adapter, Amazon has them for several brands of battery, mine is Milwaukee

Buck converter or voltage converter

stomp box enclosure

led, led mount

switch

resistor

jack, to connect to your pedals

wire, etc

Step 1:

Here is the battery adapter, mounted to the stomp-box enclosure. The enclosure comes with a special drill bit that enables you to drill holes the right size to mount your jacks and switch

Step 2:

Amazon has lots of buck converters, sometimes called voltage converters. The inputs and outputs are labeled and the output voltage is adjustable. I needed a voltmeter to adjust the one I got. Some come with a readout. Adjust your output to 9 volts for most pedals.

Step 3:

your led needs a resistor connected to the + side in series. This is the longer lead. You don't really need the led, it's just there to remind you when you have your power supply on.

The output jack is wired so the center pin is negative, like your pedals.

To wire it all up I connected the positive wire from the battery adapter to my little toggle switch. I soldered 2 wires out of the switch, one to the buck converter and one to my led. The output of the buck converter goes to the jack. All of the grounds hook up to the black wire from your battery adapter.

Make sure you adjust the voltage before hooking up your pedals.

I glued my buck converter to a small piece of wood with silicon and them glued that to my enclosure. It all fit in the enclosure fine. I think it might be a little top heavy to velcro to a pedal board. A large size enclosure would help with that. You could also screw the battery adapter to you pedal board seperately to make changing the battery an easier proposition, my adapter is a little difficult to get to release the battery.

If you use an 18volt battery, like I did, you could also have a separate 18volt output for your pedals that can use 18 volts.

I am not an electrical engineer or professional, so there might be a better way to some of this. So far it has worked great for me. I can run all my pedals without plugging a power supply into the wall and noise from AC power is eliminated.