Rectifinuverter (WaveWrecker)

Feb 08, 2024

The Rectifinuverter consists of two half-wave rectifiers that can either split a single input signal into a positive and a negative half, or half-wave rectify 2 seperate input signals independently. After being rectified the signals are routed through attenuverters and sent to their outputs, as well as to a third mixed output.

Some ways the module can be used:

Two independent half-wave rectifiers
Single full-wave rectifier
Creating new waveforms by combining the top half of a wave with the bottom half of another.

Backstory

This module isn’t my original creation. Jakob haQ (check out his youtube channel) came up with the original idea and design for a module that splits a wave into its positive and negative half, and posted it on Moritz Klein’s discord community. After I and a couple other people provided feedback on the design, ericboon joined in and made some improvements to the circuit and had the idea of adding attenuverters after the rectifiers. I thought this module turned out to be interesting and wanted to build one so I then started working on a stripboard layout. While working on the layout, I got the idea of adding the mixed output, which would allow the module to also work as a full-wave rectifier. The result is this module. Later ericboon also added an offset control to the circuit but that isn’t included in my version.

Schematic

Rectifinuverter schematic

Download:

Stripboard layout

Rectifinuverter stripboard layout

Download: Rectifinuverter-stripboard.diy (0.1 MiB)

BOM

Name	Value
R1, R2, R3, R4	220k
R5, R6, R7, R8	47k
R9, R10, R11, R12, R15, R16, R17, R18, R19	100k
R13, R14, R20	1k
C1, C2	10μ
C3, C4, C5, C6	100n
D1, D2, D3, D4	1N4148
U1	TL074
U2	TL072

Notes

With the values listed here the gain range of the inputs is 1 to -1. If you want to increase the gain you can replace R3 and R4 with a larger value. I actually replaced them with 300k in the module I built.

R5, R6, R7 and R8 are used to skew the attenuverter potentiometers' response curves towards the middle (learn more here). If you prefer a linear response you can leave them out. I left them out in my build.