hey guys
today I want to show you my custom pedal build. When I discovered the pisound project some months ago this project popped up almost immediately in my mind.
As you can see in the pictures below, I put the raspberry pi 3 + pisound into one pedal housing. All connected to a teensy 4 microcontroller. As I am not really into programming a microcontroller at all I was lucky to find the BMC project: BadassMidiController
It is a handy browser based tool where you can program a midi controller for your needs using a simple graphical user interface. It was a bit of a journey to understand this thing but finally I made it.
My aim was to use the aida-x plugin (as it is less much less processor hungry than the neural amp modeler) as my amp setup. Mainly for carrying my own sunn beta lead in a pedal around. But of course you can find some other great modeled amps out there. (unfortunately not as many as for the NAM plugin…)
controlling the modep pedalboard via the switches works like a charm. I am able to switch between pedalboards (which is in my case mainly switching between three different amps) Turn on and off some effects like phaser, reverb and delay and tap the tempo of the delay. The LED s are showing the state of the effects, which is great because there is no need to have a look at the web interface while playing. You have to connect to the web interface to adjust the parameters of amp and effects which is also possible via wifi or using an ethernet connection…
Maybe I have to make some holes into the housing so that the raspberry pi won’t run into heat issues. I haven’t made any long time tests yet…
It was a fun project. Check out the BMC project.
I hope this is inspiring for someone.
Cheers
georg
I’m interested in your comment about the LEDs are showing the state of the effects. Did you set this up so that the device queries the state of the effect and turning it on/off based on that state? If so…how did you do that?
actually the LEDs are is not reactive to the modep software. So if you are loading for example a snapshot where several effects change their state the LEDs won’t show the right status. I read some posts where people tried to do this and decided not to go that path as it seems to be too difficult for my skills… No problem for me as I am not using any snapshots and the pedalboards I load are saved with all effects turned off.
Nice work! Thanks especially for sharing how you packaged all the parts. Actually I am also building pisound-modep based pedal, and your work enlightened me a lot.
@EdTheHead I was actually one of those people. My MIDI controller is separate from the PiSound and connected via USB. I use mine to turn on/off effects, similar to your setup:
A few months ago I wanted to expand this pedalboard to automatically turn on/off LEDs if the corresponding effect was on/off. It would have required a major rewrite of the micro controller code and a new program running on the Pi to talk to the controller. When I thought about what I was going to get relative to the amount of work it just didn’t make sense.
@jtemple967 looks like a great project too! You can even programm the pedal with hardware buttons!?That’s cool. In my case I have to open the housing and connect the teensy via USB to the PC to do that. Way less comfortable.
@EdTheHead yes, it can be programmed directly from the pedal with just the buttons. You can have multiple “mappings”. Each mapping defines the status, label and MIDI CC of the 6 switches and the expression port. A switch can be “off” or have a midi CC assigned. The labels can also be set via the buttons. You can switch mappings by pressing the “mode” foot switch, which is the footswitch on the upper right then pressing the two foot switches below for up/down to select a mapping.
