I discovered that Thonk carries a DIY kit for Venus Instruments Veno-Echo. I had been looking for a high quality stereo digital delay and knew about the Veno-Echo but didn’t feel like paying the price for an assembled one. The kit made my decision. Many demo videos exist for this delay, so this post will focus on building the kit.

The kit came packaged by Thonk, but it looks as though Venus Instruments wrote the assembly guide. This is a very easy build. The PCB holds all the panel parts and has just a few pre-soldered SMD parts. The guts are all in the Daisy board.

Assembly consists of soldering the shrouded Eurorack power header and the four sockets for the Daisy board to the back of the PCB and then mounting and soldering all the panel parts to the front.

I departed from the assembly instructions in only one thing. I decided to use all the toggle switch hardware. One nut and then lockwasher behind the panel and the other hex nut on the front. The washer and nut on the back fit perfectly to fill the space behind the panel. I preferred to do this rather than let the switches be supported only by their soldered legs.

Programming the Daisy

Although the Daisy was supposed to be programmed (the software is version 1.0), when it powered up the first time, the reverse LEDs were slowly cycling back and forth, the left red LED was constantly on, and none of the controls did anything. So I followed the instructions in the user manual to reprogram it with the 1.0 binary. After that, all was good.

I will certainly be posting some lovely sounds made using this nice delay!