Musicians Free Pedalboard Platform

I am passionate musician and engineer and this project allows me to combine both of these passions by building an:

An open source platform for building pedalboard components

More and more pedalboards are having components that offer MIDI capabilities. However, reality shows that they are often incompatible

or require some additional processing. 

There are many commercial products around which offer MIDI foot controller capabilities. However these are often expensive solutions.

Also due to chip shortage smaller suppliers of such (very good) solutions are out of stock.

Given the relatively low technical complexity of building a MIDI foot controller: an open source hard- and software platform could solve many

of these issues in a pretty simple way. 

But wait. Does it have to stop there? Wouldn't it be great to also add some Audio Processing Unit inside the box? That would open endless possibilities for custom stomp boxes and pedalboards.

This is not a new idea, there are some projects and platforms already around. But this project is different to most of them because it aims to be:

- completely Free & Open Source (hardware and software) GPL Licensed

- modular: if you only want MIDI, you can just not add the audio processing units. This also has some reliability advantages. Even with problems on the audio system, the Midi controller will still work independently. 

- builder friendly (can be produced with simple tools available nearly everywhere)

- re-use popular hardware modules that can be purchased worldwide.

- the form factor of the hardware is slightly bigger than most of the other projects allowing for more controllers and more processing power. The design is targeting a 180x120x35mm box.

- less than a concrete product, this project offers a platform to build pedals on top.

- the goal ist to build a useful tool for life performance, its not intended to be a playground to fiddle around on stage.

Architecture

Motherboard

The motherboard carries the components. It is currently designed to be builder friendly. It can be built with simple tools and can be configured in a flexible ways.

See https://github.com/pedalboard/pedalboard-hw for more details

Case

A 3D printable case is designed. See https://github.com/pedalboard/pedalboard-case for more details.

LED Ring

Instead of just using a single RGB LED, this option allows to use a whole addressable LED ring to expose more information to the musician.

See https://github.com/pedalboard/pedalboard-led-ring for more information

Why I am asking for support?

I am very happy with the current state of the project. I am using it for live performance already. But - as usual - many things can be improved:

• I would like to directly interface the Raspberry PI CM4 mode with improved USB access.
• The LED-Ring wants to be integrated into the design.
• Although not most important on stage, some display (LCD and/or LED matrix) would be useful.
• A custom (open hardware) sound card.
• A second (half size) form factor would be interesting to build.

I would love to continue to improve the project. It will always be completely free and open source, thats what is different to other similar hardware platforms out there.

Why PCBway

PCBway allows me to build my dreams in reality. While with open source software so much is possible nowadays, PCBway allows similar for open hardware to make a better world.