The perfect blend of DIY pedal kit and digital signal processing software, the Hothouse is an accelerator for creating your own Electrosmith Daisy Seed-based, embedded DSP effects.

Electrosmith changed the landscape of DIY embedded digital signal processing with the release of its inexpensive and powerful Daisy Seed. And even though the Daisy Seed is easy to program in languages like C++, Arduino, Puredata/Plugdata, and Max/MSP Gen~, there is still a lot of work required to make your project real-world ready: you still need to design and build appropriate audio buffers, source electronic components and hardware controls, and then wire up the audio I/O, power, and other hardware like potentiometers and switches. Many projects may even require custom PCBs or perfboard designs. Then, add to that the design of the control layout and precisely drilled holes in an enclosure, it’s no wonder so many DIY projects never make it off the breadboard and on to your pedalboard.

That’s where the Hothouse helps. You focus on the code, and it takes care of everything else.

The Hothouse features high quality circuitry for audio I/O buffering, power filtering, voltage regulation, and noise filtering, all baked right on to the main PCB. All you need to do is solder in the pots, switches, LEDs, jacks, and ribbon cables. Add your Daisy Seed and you’re good to go. Start hacking and hearing your own code right away, or flash your Daisy Seed with any of the GNU-licensed, pre-compiled or ready-to-compile effects from the official companion code repository.

Choice of full or partial kit components or a fully-assembled pedal.

The Hothouse is available in several variations to suit your specific needs:

• Fully-assembled pedal. This is the fastest way to get up and running. It’s also ideal for folks lacking the DIY equipment or required experience for the assembly process.
• Full kit. Everything you need to assemble a Hothouse in the official enclosure featuring a rugged powder coat finish and Cleveland Music Co. artwork.
• Kit without the enclosure. Includes everything in the full kit except the official enclosure. Perfect for anyone using a 125B enclosure with their own custom artwork.
• PCBs only (coming soon). Includes just the PCBs and two 20-pin female headers for the Daisy Seed. Ideal for anyone planning to provide their own components and/or custom enclosure or other non-pedal format. And for those wanting to change the Hothouse’s UX hardware components (like the switches or audio jacks), this option maximises your flexibility. For example, you might choose not to use the provided I/O PCB or ribbon cables and wire up two pairs of TS mono audio jacks instead.

Flexible control layout.

The Hothouse gives you plenty of programmable controls for most DIY projects. With a choice to use either 2-position or 3-position toggle switches, the control layout can be tailored to your project needs. You can even mix and match the switch types if you wish; it’s simply a matter of writing your code to handle the required states. The controls provided are:

• Full frequency range instrument level inputs! Bass, synth, and drums friendly (see our FAQ about level- and impedance-matching)
• 6 potentiometers
• 3 toggle switches (supports both ON-ON and ON-OFF-ON switches) for up to 27 programmable states
• 2 momentary foot switches
• 2 LEDs
• Top-mounted stereo audio and power jacks (supports 1/4″ TRS for stereo operation or TS for mono)
• Rugged powder-coated 125B enclosure with professional artwork

NOTE: the Hothouse ships with 3-position toggle switches. If you want to use 2-position toggle switches, you will need to acquire them separately.

Fully-stereo digital signal processing.

The Hothouse is a fully-stereo pedal capable of mono-to-mono, mono-to-stereo, or stereo-to-stereo effects and more, depending on how you program it. So, if you want to create a custom mono delay/reverb effect for your no-frills guitar rig, no problem! Working on a stereo shimmer reverb for your generative music synth setup? Also, not a problem.

The HothouseExamples GitHub repository has many starter projects that demonstrate these modes.

An official companion repository on GitHub.

Get involved. Use the official code examples as a launchpad, compile and flash them as-is, or write your own effects from scratch with the provided code template. The growing code repository can be found at https://github.com/clevelandmusicco/HothouseExamples.