Datam0sh / Air Guitar

This projects represents perhaps my second success at marrying software and hardware in an audio context, and is certainly the smallest project I am most proud of.

So what is it?

Datamosh is a networked guitar pedal - and as far as I can tell, the first of its kind. Using an embedded WiFi chip (of ESP32 heritage), the pedal can communicate with a smartphone within radio range, or if provided a network to connect to, over the internet.

This communication link enables the pedal to reconfigure various audio effects and control them remotely, which as little latency as turning a real knob.

Driving the development of this machine was a desire to jam with my sister. I don't live with her and I don't play guitar, but I can control effects and tweak tunes with some aesthetic sense that all people share to some degree.

The pedal is now housed in a repurposed Boss enclosure (pictured in cover image), and is fully compatible with other audio signals via standard quarter inch jacks, so that it may work in concert with other pedals in an effects rack.

The potential to integrate network streams, or update the pedal in a user friendly way with more effects has not been fully explored, but the capabilities of the Teensy 3.6 microcontroller and WiFi connectivity have left a rather large door open for future iterations.

This work is currently on display at Concordia among other, better works by my peers in Computation Arts.