Small FCB footswitch midi controller for Kemper

Hi there !

If you want to know who I am just read my presentation there : Théo from Switzerland

I'm guitarist in the swiss band Way Of Changes and a user of kemper for almost 3 years now. I've always been really happy with it until I tried to find a footswitch for it.

I wanted 3 things on it : A Tuner, A Volume pedal (or mute button) and some switch to navigate through the rigs.
I found out that the only midi foot controller which seemed to be able to do this was the FCB1010 with a UnO (4 Kemper) chip… but come on! This thing is huge ! And I don't need all those switches !
If I want to add the reverb to my rig I just create the same rig with reverb on it and I'll switch between the both, I don't need a switch for delay, one for reverb etc…

So here's what I thought : "Let's cut it in half". And I did it, and it works perfectly fine. Oh yeah and I thought "Let's paint it galaxy" too, which my bandmates found really gay, it's a matter of taste.
I'm glad to present to you my galaxy board : It has a volume pedal, when I drop my volume to 0 it shows the tuner (thanks to the UnO chip), with the 5 switch I can chose between the 5 rigs of my performance, with the arrows I can navigate through my performances. It's simple, it fits in a rack drawer and I mean, come on, I got a galaxy under my feet !

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If you want to see more of it just check it there : https://www.facebook.com/theo.…3741827.1584007080&type=1

I don't know if someone is interested to know how to do this, it's really easy and you don't have to know anything about electronics so just ask me and I'll explain it to you.

I apologize for my bad english.

Quote from Robrecht

Dude I hope I never get in your way!

Pretty brilliant though. I was wondering how bad the cut would look but in the Facebook pics I saw you were able to re-use the plastic end piece. So I guess you physically moved buttons 1, 2 and 3 (or their internal connections) to the top?

Haha thanks !
Yes that's what I did. The switches 1 to 5 and 6 to 10 are on 2 PCB. I configured my FCB1010 before doing anything. Then I removed the 6 to 10 PCB. I cut the other one in two parts : Switch 1 to 3 and switch 4 and 5. I let the 4 to 5 at its place and moved the other one to the top. I just welded (is this the right word?) them like they were before. I also removed the other expression pedal but this didn't imply any changes.
The metal is pretty hard to cut but hopefully I have a friend who makes custom flight cases (Kronecase) who helped me with this part.

Doing this I was forced to make some new holes for the MIDI and Jack In & Out. I did them were the On/Off switch was and put the switch on the side (which in fact is pretty cool because I am able to turn it on with my foot).
I had to make some adjustment to re-use the side pieces and to make sur that my foot switch was solid enough (because I got rid of some support points).

That's pretty much it. See, it's not brilliant at all

Quote from Lokasenna

For electrical stuff, the English word is "solder"/"soldering"/"soldered", but welding is pretty close.

Thanks ! I was pretty sure that "welding" wasn't the word I was looking for haha

And thanks a lot to everyone for your kind words.

Again, thanks to all of you for your kind words. If you do something similar don't hesitate to show it to me !