Guitar amplifiers have a hard life, and as anyone who’s run a venue can tell you, they often have significant electrical issues after a life on the road. [Dsagman] had a Vox amplifier with fried internals, and rather than repair the original he rebuilt it with a Raspberry Pi inside to provide a fully-loaded array of effects.
Though the subject is the Vox, it’s best to see this as more a tale of how to create a guitar effect array in a Pi than specifically put it in an amplifier. The Pi has an audio board and an MCP3008 ADC added to it, and using those two it takes its inputs from a series of potentiometers and process the audio passing through the audio board. In addition there are a series of LED indicators and an LED bar graph to keep the user in touch with what’s going on.
The whole lot is nicely integrated in the VOX case with all the potentiometers on an aluminium panel. He discusses amplifier choice, but as you might expect the final choice is a Class D module. All in all an amp many readers would probably go for.
As long-time readers will remember, guitar effects have made quite a few appearances around here.
Really appreciate the slide deck! I had something like this on my TODO list for the summer.
so it LOOKS like it would sound good, but then it’s all solid state and doesn’t live up to the sound of a tube amp.
wonder how badly the vox was broken that someone would basically just use the box and the speaker and spend all this cash to get a lower quality product.
cool project though. can see how itd be fun to make and tinker with.
Is it me, or are the pots backwards? Looks like 0 is to the right and 10 (or 11) is to the left.
Lots of china parts and modules which break easily or are broken to begin with. Those class D amps need lots of cap in the power supply. Real caps not Capxon junk. Wattage ratings of amplifiers are a joke.
A raspberry Pi running Rakarack would be fun, lesser quality digital processing might come off sounding like a cheap karaoke effect. The output is in stereo or multi-channel, time for an audio system instead of just an amp.