MIDI pedal project looks as good as it sounds

organ-pedal-midi-project

[Lee O'Donnell] is showing off his version of a MIDI organ pedal hack. We've been seeing a few of these lately. The organ pedals are a great stating point as they're easy to patch into electronically, and are designed to take a beating from your feet and come out the other side no worse for wear. The build goes beyond one of our favorite MIDI pedal conversions in both features and finish. An … [Read more...]

Hi-Hat MIDI controller

midi-hi-hat-controller

Drumming hackers take note, if you've got an extra bass drum pedal it's cheap and simple to use it as a MIDI controller. This rig was thrown together to supplement a DIG DRUM electric drum set. That piece of equipment has a pedal add-on that didn't come with it. Turns out all it does is feed a resistance value to the set. To get this up and running a frame was built from a metal base and … [Read more...]

Simple to build programmable foot switches

programmable-footswitches

Your hands do a lot of work between the keyboard and the mouse, why the heck are you letting your feet be so lazy? [Dossier van D.] is putting an end to the podiatric sloth. He built this set of three foot pedals which have gone through two versions of functionality. The buttons themselves are made from a base plate of plywood with a smaller piece on top for each 'key'. The two parts are … [Read more...]

Guitar foot controller uses DSP for audio effects

guitar-pedal-dsp1

This a screenshot taken from [Pierre's] demonstration of an electric guitar effects pedal combined with DSP and Pure Data. He pulls this off by connecting the guitar directly to the computer, then feeds the computer's audio output to the guitar amp. The foot controls include a pedal and eight buttons, all monitored by an Arduino. Pure Data, a visual programming language, interprets the input … [Read more...]

MIDI man-in-the-middle hack lets you add pedal to the mix

midi-pedal-patch

[Sebastian] has a friend who would like to use a pedal with his MIDI setup, but his keyboard doesn't support one. Some might interpret that as a sign you need to buy a new keyboard. But [Sebastian] has already done a lot of work with the MIDI protocol. He knew it should be possible to create a MIDI pass-through which adds support for a pedal. You can see the two MIDI cables connected to the box … [Read more...]

BaceMaker weds organ foot pedals with guitar whammy effects

bacemaker-organ-hack

[Jon Ferwerda] managed to fry the analog electronics on an old electric organ while conducting some circuit bending experiments. It's a loss, but he's still left with some cool equipment to play with. Recently he got to work generating tones using the organ's foot pedals. There were two types of foot pedal included with this organ, the set that is arranged like a keyboard, and a rocker pedal … [Read more...]

Pedal-powered 32-core ARM Linux server

redhatguy (Custom)

Sure, it's probably a gimmick to [Jon Masters], but we absolutely love the pedal-powered server he built using a group of ARM chips. [Jon] is an engineer at Red Hat and put together  the project in order to show off the potential of the low-power ARM offerings. The platform is a quad-core Calxeda EnergyCore ARM SoC. Each chip draws only 5 Watts at full load, with eight chips weighing in at … [Read more...]