Produced something very similar as part of the Cambridge CS degree in 2010. We used ARM's mBed platform (http://mbed.org) to build a set of modular effect classes in C++ that could be chained together and blasted onto a single device to create a signal processing chain.
The 10-bit DAC and Cortex-M0 processor didn't help but we got some very interesting results by using Chebychev distortion.
As someone who would have loved this a decade ago but whose instruments have mostly collected dust the last several years, I'm a bit surprised that this is packaged as a traditional pedal. Do musicians still travel and perform with a crate of effects pedals? I would have assumed that much of this would have shifted to mobile (in an appropriately rugged case). Are the audio adapters too poor quality, is Android not sufficiently real time, is this product simply for retro appeal, or ... what am I missing?
Pedals are still the state of the art. Why would any performing musician want to use a smartphone instead of something designed to be controlled by feet, even if Android had something close to real time audio (it still doesn't)?
The appeal of physical pedals is still strong – as is a general aversion to taking a computer on tour with you.
A laptop is seen as unreliable (or unauthentic) by most musicians I've encountered, even though most of those same musicians readily embrace modern technology in the studio.
Some pedals just seem to sound better than comparable software offerings (i.e. http://www.strymon.net/products/bluesky/) which if anything is a testament to the DSP engineers working on them.
Personally, I use a laptop and Akai MPK49 controller keyboard live. I had my first ever crash while soundchecking last Wendesday...
I play semi-professionally in bands on bass; guitar players, IME, are currently favoring pedals grouped together on a board of some kind, transported in a case.
As a guitar player, and a lot of folks feel similarly, I feel that a good tube amp and a couple of relatively simple pedals is the best package all around, from reliability to portability to sound quality.
There are many possible options (the best alternative I have heard is digital processor that emulates amplifiers), and there are lot of options on the phone.
However, even the best of these phone or mobile options is less rugged and not as good sounding as the other possibilities, so people generally stick with known quantities.
my flatmate has a boss multieffects pedal. hundreds of settings. rugged and can be stomped on.
I've heard that android is notoriously bad at audio and google aren't interested in putting resources behind that aspect of the platform, so there are latency problems and what not. There's an open issue about it on google code iirc.
I've found that trying to output audio or MIDI in real-time on the JVM (on Android or PC) is a lost cause, perhaps because of the unpredictability of GC
Martin and Guillaume are great guys. Some very awesome things are going to happen with this project once it's out in the wild. I encourage people to get involved!
This is a small collection of programmable guitar pedals I've been maintaining, including The Owl, my own design, the FV-1 and many others for Arduinos and whatnot: http://diydsp.com/livesite/pages/GuitarPedals
If you don't know that an "effects pedal" is a piece of musical equipment, the headline makes it sound like open source, programmable effects are riding bicycles for guitarists, musicians and hackers.
I guess it's conceivable that people would come up with a fundraising idea involving riding bikes to fund musicians, but referring to the bike riders as "open source, programmable effects" sounds downright bizarre.
Unfortunately, the headline is limited to 80 characters (not people, but graphemes like letters and digits, in case you're not familiar with computer terminology).
