ADSL router as an effects pedal

Moore's Law may not be as immutable as we once thought, as chipmakers struggle to fit more and more transistors onto a given area of ​​silicon. But over the past few decades, it's been surprisingly consistent, with plenty of ripple effects. As computers get faster, everything related to them also gets faster, and the junk drawer tends to quickly fill up with various peripherals and computer parts that might work well, but just can't. keep pace. [Bonsembiante] had an old ADSL router that was way out of date because of these changing times, but instead of throwing it away, he turned it into a guitar effects pedal.

The premise of this release is that the router is essentially a Linux box, with ALSA support. Of course, that means flashing custom firmware, which isn't the easiest task, but once sound support was added to the device, it was able to interface with a USB sound card. An additional C++ program was created to handle the actual audio received from the guitar and sound card. For this demo, [Bonsembiant] programmed a ring buffer and feeds it back to the output to achieve an echo effect, but one can assume that any effect or multiple effects could be programmed.

For anyone looking for the source code for the signal processing the router currently does, it's listed on a separate GitHub page. If you don't have that specific model of router in your parts bin, there are much more readily available Linux machines that can do the job instead.