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Electrosmash Pedal Pi

REVIEW

T

ElectroSmash Pedal Pi

£49.95 electrosmash.com

By Andrew Gregory AndrewGregory83

he world of the guitarist is full of

expensive gear. Online discussions

rage about what types of wire are

best in guitar pickups, which kinds

of transistors (germanium or silicon)

provide the best fuzz tone, and, possibly

the biggest question of all: pentode or tetrode

rectifier? In short, the electronics geek and the guitar

geek have loads in common, and this pedal promises

to give some overlap between the two worlds.

The ElectroSmash Pedal Pi is a programmable

guitar effects pedal that uses a Raspberry Pi zero

and some code (written in the C programming

language), that the user downloads on to the Pi,

compiles, and runs to provide the brains of the

effect. There’s nothing to stop you writing your

own effects from scratch, but the sensible way to

get started is to use ElectroSmash’s own samples

and go from either using code contributed by the

Pedal Pi’s user community or modifying the code

parameters yourself. The pedal comes in kit form,

so first of all you have to build it.

CONSTRUCTION

With almost no soldering experience, we found the

Pedal Pi pleasingly straightforward to put together.

With just a few exceptions, the components

were clearly labelled, and the instructions on the

ElectroSmash website are clear and easy to follow.

Being afflicted by colour-blindness, the bands on

resistors were impossible to read, so we had to take

a trip to our friendly local electronics store to get

someone to confirm the resistance values for two

of the unlabelled resistors. There are also two chips

(the op-amp and the analogue to digital converter)

that could go on the board in a number of ways. The

troubleshooting guide says to check that these are

the right way round, but we couldn’t find anywhere

in the instructions to show what this right way round

was; the information is there on the ElectroSmash

site, it just took us a while to look for it.

It’s also not mentioned in the instructions that

you need to solder the included header pins to the