
Open source, programmable effects pedal for guitarists, musicians and hackers - dsego
http://hoxtonowl.com
======
mattkirman
Whilst the site is down here's a link to their successful Kickstarter from
last year that gives a bit more information about the project -
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marser/owl-
programmable...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marser/owl-programmable-
effects-pedal)

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bjelkeman-again
Thanks. I need to get on of them.

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rhodri
Radical!

Produced something very similar as part of the Cambridge CS degree in 2010. We
used ARM's mBed platform ([http://mbed.org](http://mbed.org)) to build a set
of modular effect classes in C++ that could be chained together and blasted
onto a single device to create a signal processing chain.

The 10-bit DAC and Cortex-M0 processor didn't help but we got some very
interesting results by using Chebychev distortion.

Here's a picture of me and Scott rocking out:
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/group-
projects/photos-2010/...](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/group-
projects/photos-2010/g.jpg)

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gtani
Maybe they got a traffic spike somewhere, cached:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-Bxi9p...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-Bxi9peOJfAJ:http://hoxtonowl.com/%2Bsite:http://hoxtonowl.com/&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-
US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&hl=en&ct=clnk)

vaguely related NAMM news: Korg synth kit [http://gizmodo.com/build-your-own-
korg-ms-20-synth-with-this...](http://gizmodo.com/build-your-own-korg-
ms-20-synth-with-this-limited-editi-1507531364)

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skue
As someone who would have loved this a decade ago but whose instruments have
mostly collected dust the last several years, I'm a bit surprised that this is
packaged as a traditional pedal. Do musicians still travel and perform with a
crate of effects pedals? I would have assumed that much of this would have
shifted to mobile (in an appropriately rugged case). Are the audio adapters
too poor quality, is Android not sufficiently real time, is this product
simply for retro appeal, or ... what am I missing?

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badgod
my flatmate has a boss multieffects pedal. hundreds of settings. rugged and
can be stomped on.

I've heard that android is notoriously bad at audio and google aren't
interested in putting resources behind that aspect of the platform, so there
are latency problems and what not. There's an open issue about it on google
code iirc.

~~~
rhodri
I've found that trying to output audio or MIDI in real-time on the JVM (on
Android or PC) is a lost cause, perhaps because of the unpredictability of GC

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jarmitage
Martin and Guillaume are great guys. Some very awesome things are going to
happen with this project once it's out in the wild. I encourage people to get
involved!

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agladlad
cool! You should also check out the pedalShield for Arduino
[http://www.electrosmash.com/pedalshield](http://www.electrosmash.com/pedalshield)

~~~
chillingeffect
This is a small collection of programmable guitar pedals I've been
maintaining, including The Owl, my own design, the FV-1 and many others for
Arduinos and whatnot:
[http://diydsp.com/livesite/pages/GuitarPedals](http://diydsp.com/livesite/pages/GuitarPedals)

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gourneau
If anyone has old racing game controller pedals around, they are easy to
connect to with PyGame to do anything you want. Here is an example:
[https://github.com/gourneau/webpedals/blob/master/drivedata....](https://github.com/gourneau/webpedals/blob/master/drivedata.py)

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beshrkayali
This sounds awesome!

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MWil
site down?

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robinhoodexe
Seems so

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dec0dedab0de
too bad, it sounds awesome.

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arms
Agreed. I just watched the kickstarter vid and this is exactly what I've been
hoping for. Can't wait til I get one in my pedal board!

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csense
This is a poor headline.

If you don't know that an "effects pedal" is a piece of musical equipment, the
headline makes it sound like open source, programmable effects are riding
bicycles for guitarists, musicians and hackers.

I guess it's conceivable that people would come up with a fundraising idea
involving riding bikes to fund musicians, but referring to the bike riders as
"open source, programmable effects" sounds downright bizarre.

~~~
dsego
Unfortunately, the headline is limited to 80 characters (not people, but
graphemes like letters and digits, in case you're not familiar with computer
terminology).

~~~
mwfunk
I'm sorry, "digits"? You mean like fingers? Why would you put fingers in a
headline? What does that even mean?!?

