ElectroSmash pedalShield Mega – Part 1

My oldest son has been getting really in to music lately.  He has taught himself guitar, bass, ukulele, piano, and most recently violin.  Having an electrical background, I started to look at the different ways the pedals and guitars are put together.  I started to look at the pedal clones and wanted to do a pedal for my son.  After looking around I saw the pedalShield series.  I like working with Arduinos and Raspberry Pis as you still get to use real components and easily interact with them. The pedalShield Mega looked interesting as it has an LED screen on it to help you see your effects.  I was also interested in being able flash new effects on the pedal as needed.

I have decided to give it a go and have ordered the pedalSHIELD MEGA Kit.  They give you all the schematics and part numbers (minus the LED) to order them yourself from Mouser.  Pricing it out, you do save money ordering the kit directly from ElectroSmash.  The only problem for me is that it is international shipping so a bit of a wait.  I also needed to order the Arduino Mega 2560 board.  That is the brains of the programmable pedal.  My normal go to is Adafruit.  On their site it lists the board as discontinued (link).  After reading a few reviews, I decided to go with a clone board from Amazon.  I went with the Elegoo LYSB01H4ZDYCE-ELECTRNCSMEGA 2560 R3 Board.  While I was on the Amazon site, I felt that to do the job properly I need a new soldering iron, helping hands, and cutter.  The quick math is that I will be doing around 141 solder points for this project.

So far I have spent $108.92 on the project:
$14.86 – Arduino Mega 2560 Clone
$25.85 – Tools
$00.00 – Amazon Prime Shipping
$53.84 – ElectroSmash Kit
$14.37 – Shipping from ElectroSmash

I will still need to get some stand offs to make sure everything is nice and stable when he steps on the pedal and the case enclosure.

I have been going through the forums and looking at the work other have already done with the programming.  I look forward to this project as I haven’t done a project like this in a while.