BitCrush Pedal

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  cooking

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  this is fire

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  cooked

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  tired

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Inspiration

I've been playing guitar for 2 years now, and I've been wanting to make my own pedals for a while.

What it does

Normally, when audio is saved on a computer, there are (usually) 44.1k samples per second, and each of those seconds is stored as a 12 bit value. When we "bit crush" an audio sample, we reduce the bit resolution of our sample. So this pedal takes in a sample, crushes the bit resolution, and then sends that off

How we built it

guitar pickups -> pre-amp -> Arduino Nano -> op-amp -> speaker

Challenges we ran into

Audio engineering was an incredibly new field for us. We're not experts at this, but we wanted to dip our toes into this type of engineering.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to build a fuzz pedal just to have something built, and we managed to make that first try!

What we learned

We learned a lot about signal processing that we weren't aware of, specifically the best way to get rid of noise, which showed up ALOT in our circuits

What's next for Bit Crush Pedal

This thing can be significantly optimized, possibly turned into a surface mount PCB, with higher audio resolution, and less noise

Built With

• c++