My oldest son has been getting really in to music lately.\u00a0 He has taught himself guitar, bass,\u00a0ukulele, piano, and most recently violin.\u00a0 Having an electrical background, I started to look at the different ways the pedals and guitars are put together.\u00a0 I started to look at the pedal clones and wanted to do a pedal for my son.\u00a0 After looking around I saw the pedalShield series.\u00a0 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\u00a0help you see your effects.\u00a0 I was also interested in being able flash new effects on the pedal as needed.<\/p>\n
I have decided to give it a go and have ordered the pedalSHIELD MEGA Kit<\/a>.\u00a0 They give you all the schematics and part numbers (minus the LED) to order them yourself from Mouser.\u00a0 Pricing it out, you do save money ordering the kit directly from ElectroSmash.\u00a0 The only problem for me is that it is international shipping so a bit of a wait.\u00a0 I also needed to order the Arduino Mega 2560 board.\u00a0 That is the brains of the programmable pedal.\u00a0 My normal go to is Adafruit.\u00a0 On their site it lists the board as discontinued (link<\/a>).\u00a0 After reading a few reviews, I decided to go with a clone board from Amazon.\u00a0 I went with the\u00a0Elegoo LYSB01H4ZDYCE-ELECTRNCSMEGA 2560 R3 Board<\/a>.\u00a0 While I was on the Amazon site, I felt that to do the job properly I need a new soldering iron<\/a>, helping hands<\/a>, and cutter<\/a>.\u00a0 The quick math is that I will be doing around 141 solder points for this project.<\/p>\n So far I have spent $108.92 on the project: 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.<\/p>\n
\n$14.86 – Arduino Mega 2560 Clone
\n$25.85 – Tools
\n$00.00 – Amazon Prime Shipping
\n$53.84 – ElectroSmash Kit
\n$14.37 – Shipping from ElectroSmash<\/p>\n