Hothouse / Daisy Build
The Hothouse platform turns a digital pedal build into two separate projects — a real soldering job with a fixed, documented hardware layout, and a software project that decides what the finished pedal actually does. This guide covers the assembly steps, toolchain setup, and a sensible first-firmware target that exercises the whole signal path end to end.
Building on the Hothouse means treating this as two distinct projects run back to back: assembling the fixed hardware skeleton covered in The Hothouse Build, then writing and flashing the code that actually turns it into an effect. Nothing about the assembly step differs from any other through-hole solder job — what’s different is that finishing the soldering doesn’t finish the pedal.
Assembly
| Step | Notes |
|---|---|
| Solder the footswitch, six pots, toggle switch, and jacks | Standard through-hole technique per Soldering and Tools — the Hothouse’s control layout is fixed and documented, so there’s no wiring decision to make here, only execution |
| Seat and solder the Daisy Seed header | A poorly seated header is a common point of failure specific to this platform — reflow or re-check it if the board doesn’t power up or doesn’t enumerate over USB |
| Visually inspect every joint against the board’s documentation | Per Debugging a Circuit’s stage-by-stage discipline, applied here to a hardware checklist instead of a signal trace, since there’s no audio signal to probe yet |
| Wire jacks and power per the board’s documented convention | The Hothouse’s footswitch is software-controlled rather than a mechanical 3PDT true-bypass switch, but jack wiring and power/polarity protection still follow the same conventions covered in Jack Wiring and Power Supply Conventions and Polarity Safety |
Toolchain setup
- Install the libDaisy and DaisySP libraries (see The Electrosmith Daisy Guide for what each one provides).
- Confirm the board enumerates correctly over USB before writing any custom code — this isolates a hardware assembly problem from a software problem before the two get tangled together.
- Flash a known-working example project first (DaisySP ships with basic examples) to confirm the whole chain — toolchain, USB connection, and hardware — works before touching your own code.
A sensible first firmware target
Rather than starting with an original effect design, build the simplest possible circular-buffer delay covered conceptually in Coding Effects with C++ and Delay: a fixed delay time, a feedback control, and a mix control, each mapped to one of the Hothouse’s six pots. It’s small enough to debug end to end in one sitting, and it exercises the same audio-callback and real-time-safety rules every later, more ambitious effect on this platform will also depend on.
Common mistake carried over from the Digital book
Don’t debug a glitching effect with a printf or breakpoint inside the audio callback — per Coding Effects with C++, both introduce exactly the kind of unpredictable timing the real-time rules exist to prevent, and can make an otherwise-correct effect glitch only while you’re trying to observe it.
Build log
This guide is currently the reference/planning layer only. Once this build is actually underway, photos, real firmware decisions, and any deviations from the reference assembly steps belong here.