Make Your Own Guitar Pedal With Beavis Board

Beavis Audio has recently released the Beavis Board, a kit to help fledgling guitar pedal builders. The kit addresses four typical problems in this endeavor: learning to solder, dealing with breadboards, sourcing parts, and making sense of schematics. By including a breadboard/psu/switch combo and tons of other parts as well as informative and easy to read schematics, all of these problems are alleviated, allowing eager builders to get to work right out of the box.

The kit costs $249 and we’re guessing it’s a little too “entry level” for most of you. It has a highly informative manual in PDF format. You could use that to get ideas and then source your own parts. Have any of you built a guitar pedal specifically for prototyping?

[via Music Thing]

Guitar Hero Actuator


Another day, another EE that refuses to play Guitar Hero properly. [Julian Bleecker] went into the design of this Guitar Hero actuator not really knowing how to size solenoids properly. Luckily, trial and error can get you a long way. The first solenoids he purchased couldn’t apply enough force. The second was overkill. It was certainly strong enough but too heavy and too large to mount to the neck. The final set ended up being both the right size and working well even at 12V, half the design voltage. The elegant mounting system is what really makes this project shine. [Julian] provides the schematic for the ATmega168 driver board, which is an Arduino stripped of the extraneous bits.

Related: Slashbot and AutoGuitarHero

[via Make]

In-cable Guitar Preamp


[Bryan] sent in this old but excellent guitar cable hack. [J. Donald Tillman] managed to fit a fet based pre-amp inside the 1/4″ connector of a guitar cable. It’s phantom powered – so it’ll leach power from the sound board/mixer. I’m just impressed that he fit the thing inside there.

On a side note, This is the kind of crap that gives hackers a bad name. I hope the jerks behind it end up as Soylent Green.