Beginnings

I first came across the Arduino platform in 2009 when it was featured in the UK edition of Wired magazine.  My interest was immediately piqued as it ticked a lot of boxes for me;

1) It was new.  I like new stuff and am constantly looking to do new things and learn about new things.

2) It was open source.  I work as a software consultant and co-own a software reseller and systems integration startup, Step Up Software.  I have worked with several open source products in the past and find the concept of community driven software development both extremely beneficial to small and medium enterprises and intellectually rewarding.  At the risk of going off on a bit of a tangent here, but this is a bit of a hobby horse for me.  I think the world would be a much better place if there were more SME businesses and less greedy large corporations and the open source software industry fits right into the bracket of how I think business should be run.

3) I have had the idea of creating a guitar pedal for some time, but felt hampered by my complete ignorance of electronics.

So the germ of an idea as follows came to me; Could I create an interesting sounding, viable guitar pedal using easily available, cheap components?

The arduino seemed to open up a lot of possibilities to explore this idea.



The first thing I did was get my hands on an arduino board.  I bought a duemilanova starter kit, which comes with a bunch of LEDs and resistors, usb cable, a solderless breadboard a bunch of jumper cables and a push button switch.  Pretty much all an electronics dunce like me would need to get going.  I also found that the arduino site was a gold mine of software tools, sample code and other goodies.






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