ShortScale.org

I currently have a Pod 2.0, my son's Pod XT and an ancient and unreliable Flextone amp. My son wants to sell the Pod XT, or I could sell the Pod 2.0 and keep his XT.

Last week I saw an FBV4 footswitch in Cash Generator for £19.99 (reduced from £25) so bought it on impulse. This allegedly uses some sort of MIDI-like (but not MIDI) serial interface. It will select the channel A/B/C/D for the current bank on the Pod XT, and tap tempo, but it doesn't have any other facilities. Kind of like a 4-way switch for a JCM 9000 or whatever. It was probably a mistake, in retrospect.

The Pod 2.0 and the Flextone use an older-style Floorboard (loads of switches, two expression pedals) that uses an analogue output to tell the Pod what switches are pressed. Someone's selling the all-singing, all-dancing version of the board for £30 plus £8.75. The advantage of getting this vs. using my Behringer FCB1010 MIDI footpedal is that the Pod (or Flextone) updates the LED status with the actual bank/channel/effect status whereas the FCB doesn't have any reverse channel.

Would I be throwing good money after bad to pick up this Floorboard for the older tech?

I bought a Pod 2 for cheap recently and enjoy messing with it for quiet playing while the kids are asleep and I still think the amp sims sound good - don't know if I'd splash the cash on any outboard for it - unless you're the Edge he still used his live.

So I took the FBV4 apart tonight.. gut shots: It uses a 14-pin Philips P87PLC706BN 8051-type microcontroller which has 1k of ROM and the other chip is the TTL-to-RS485 interface chip. I was wondering whether they used the same board for various variant FBVs but no... The chip uses 4 inputs, 4 outputs and serial in and out. The microcontroller is socketed, so theoretically it would be easy to swap an Arduino or PIC in there on an adaptor board and do MIDI instead.

Hmmm, do an yun mod.

How did this go?

For most of us, midi = magic, and changing things inside a pedal that aren't a capacitor to make it bassier also = magic.

Going right in to change something to midi = some sort of Black Magic.

I have an FCB1010 to do MIDI so this isn't something I'm looking at right now. There are quite a few code samples out there for Arduino or Raspberrry Pi MIDI implementations out there, though.