Planning & Waiting
It’s been an odd week of ceaseless ideation, planning and the grueling task of waiting on various components — a few Arduino nanos (of which I have yet to actually use), more breadboards for prototyping, some ultrasonic sensors for some initial testing, and my latest round of spending on used pedals (tremolo, chorus, distortion).
While anticipating their arrival, I started sketching out some ideas for the pedals’ demonstrative enclosure and for the actual demonstration itself. I’m pretty certain I’m going to go all out with the peculiar attribute of impracticality for one predominant reason — I’m having a blast. I never thought messing around with electronics and seeing how microcontrollers can interact with analog guitar pedals would be so exciting and all-consuming.
I want to push the limits with just how strange I can make my final product — something uniquely IMM that showcases my ability to take knowledge learned thus far in fabrication and programming and combining it with the skills it takes to learn something completely unknown and unpredicted to myself in a relatively short amount of time.
To further push this exploration into the whacky, I think it would be interesting to create a really well polished hardwood box of sorts to house all of the electronics, resembling a guitar pedal only by the protruding button switches for each pedal as well as the in /out jacks on opposite sides. It’ll be comically well produced — looking more like an antique center piece than a guitar pedal.
Inside, each effects pedal will be connected via 1/4" patch cables as well as the presence of a power bank to feed electricity to both the Arduinos and their respective PCBs. I’m thinking I’m going to have to solder a unique circuit for each effect (see rudimentary pathway sketch below) using veroboard or perfboard — one Arduino really only has the i/o capacity for dictating values for one PCB using one sensor, as I believe now.
Lots of prototyping is next on the agenda, hopefully a clearer idea of what is going to be possible will emerge as this iterative process continues.
