pedal

31 Articles

Busted Wah Pedal Becomes New Synth Tool

July 8, 2015 by 3 Comments

Sometimes we get lucky and find a part we need for a project in our parts drawer. [Scissorfeind] got even luckier and found a part for his project lying around in the street. It was a Crybaby Wah pedal, a classic effects pedal typically used for a guitar. Since it was somewhat damaged, [Scissorfeind] got to work creating a control voltage (CV) and volume circuit for his Korg synthesizer.

For those who aren’t synthesizer aficionados, CV is a method of controlling the pitch of a tone. A higher voltage creates a higher tone and vice-versa. The wah pedal has a rocker on it that allows one’s foot to control the effect, but this particular one has been modified for CV instead of the wah-wah sound these pedals normally make. [Scissorfeind] built in a switch that will allow it to control volume as well, which makes this pedal quite unique in the effects world.

[Scissorfeind] built the custom circuit out of other parts he had lying around (presumably not in the street) and put the entire thing together on perfboard, then fit it all back together in the pedal. Now he has a great control voltage pedal for the vintage Korg synthesizer he recently restored! [Scissorfeind] knows his way around a synth, but if you’re looking to get started on a synthesizer project we have a great tutorial for you!

Bike Cinema

A Pedal Powered Cinema

May 10, 2015 by 10 Comments

When the apocalypse hits and your power goes out, how are you going to keep yourself entertained? If you are lucky enough to be friends with [stopsendingmejunk], you can just hop on his pedal powered cinema and watch whatever movies you have stored on digital media.

This unit is built around an ordinary bicycle. A friction drive is used to generate the electricity via pedal power. In order to accomplish this, a custom steel stand was fabricated together in order to lift the rear wheel off the ground. A 24V 200W motor is used as the generator. [stopsendingmejunk] manufactured a custom spindle for the motor shaft. The spindle is made from a skateboard wheel. The motor is mounted in such a way that it can be lowered to rub the skateboard wheel against the bicycle wheel. This way when the rear bicycle wheel spins, it also rotates the motor. The motor can be lifted out of the way when cruising around if desired.

The power generated from the motor first runs through a regulator. This takes the variable voltage from the generator and smooths it out to a nice even power signal. This regulated power then charges two Goal Zero Sherpa 100 lithium batteries. The batteries allow for a buffer to allow the movie to continue playing while changing riders. The batteries then power the Optomo 750 projector as well as a set of speakers.

MIDI Pedal Project Looks As Good As It Sounds

April 10, 2013 by 17 Comments

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[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 Arduino Nano pulls this project together. It scans the pedals constantly and converts the key presses into MIDI signals. But the design includes this fabulous looking front-end which [Lee] first prototyped in cardboard before cutting and bending his own Aluminum tread plate. A two-row character display provides a menu system, but the buttons themselves act as feedback based on the behavior of the light inside each of them. One example of this is shown early in the demo video after the break. The blue button toggles between polyphonic and monophonic mode with the light fading in and out for the latter.

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Hi-Hat MIDI Controller

March 27, 2013 by 10 Comments

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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 acrylic side piece. The acrylic hosts a trimmable potentiometer which connects to an 1/4″ stereo jack right beside it. This facilitates connecting the pedal to the drum set using an audio patch cable. Interface with the pedal is accomplished with a few bits from the hardware store. The axle of the pedal sticks out one side, and is clamped between two washers. The other side of the washer grip the timpot causing it to move when the pedal does.

This hardware is a snap to use with your own MIDI device. We’d suggest giving the HIDUINO package a try.

Simple To Build Programmable Foot Switches

February 26, 2013 by 19 Comments

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 separated with some foam carpet pad, with a tactile push button in between to register a click. The only thing we’d change about this is adding a couple of wooden spacers next to the switch so that accidentally sanding on a button doesn’t break that electronic component.

Originally each button was soldered to a gaming controller. This worked just fine using button mapping, but recently [Dossier] made the switch to using an Arduino Leonardo. This is a perfect choice. Unlike input devices made with older Arduino versions the Leonardo board can natively register as a keyboard, making it a snap to programmatically map any key to the switches.

If you like this project you should check out [Dossier’s] foot mouse as well.

Guitar Foot Controller Uses DSP For Audio Effects

November 30, 2012 by 7 Comments

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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 coming from the Arduino over USB and alters the incoming audio using digital signal processing. [Pierre] manages the audio connection using the JACK Audio Connection Kit software package.

In the video after the break he’s using a laptop for most of the work, but he has also managed to pull this off with a Raspberry Pi. There’s no audio input on the RPi board, but he’s been using a USB sound card anyway. The other USB port connects the Arduino and he’s in business.

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MIDI Man-in-the-middle Hack Lets You Add Pedal To The Mix

September 26, 2012 by 8 Comments

[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 above. One is the input from the keyboard, the other is the output to the synthesizer. There is also a jack for a pedal input to the left. The chip inside intercepts each packet, rolling in values based from the pedal input and passing on the altered packets to the synthesizer. As you can hear in the video after the break, this works like a charm.

Catch more of [Sebastian’s] midi work by following his keyboard sensor replacement projects.

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