Open Source Guitar Pedal with Arduino Mega

While custom guitar effects pedals are nothing new, usually if you want something truly unique you need to take out the soldering iron and start modding components. While this is exciting to many, if you’d rather have a custom sound while preserving your fingers for pressing the proper frets, the pedalSHIELD MEGA from ElectroSmash lets you do just that.

The pedalSHIELD MEGA plugs into the Arduino as a shield, and features a standard ¼-inch input jack, a toggle switch, two configurable pushbuttons, a 3PDT true bypass footswitch, and even an OLED display to show you what’s going on.

The board’s circuitry amplifies the guitar signal, allowing the Arduino to digest it via its ADC (analog to digital converter). The Mega then processes this signal, and spits it back out with the appropriate effects according to its programming, combining two PWM outputs into a 16-bit signal.

The pedal is designed in KiCAD and is open source, so you can modify the hardware as needed. It’s available in kit form or as a PCB only. So while you might burn your fingers if you’re not careful when assembling things, at least you’ll only have to do this once. You can then mod sounds to your heart’s content with keystrokes in the Arduino IDE.

You can see the pedalSHIELD MEGA in action below and delve deeper into its specs here.