I’ve built a lot of guitar pedals. One thing that appealed to me was doing the art digitally, which means it’s relatively straightforward to get more copies. Furthermore, when you fabricate PCBs you typically must order at least 5 of them at a time. This means that I accumulated a lot of spare PCBs. The same goes for many electronic components, where ordering in bulk just makes a lot of sense (for many components, the individual price is a few cents and typically under a dollar).

On the other hand, building pedals by hand is still a pretty intensive process, so any individual pedal still takes probably 1.5-3 hours to assemble. It’s far from cheap. But I do like soldering.

So, I spun up a little business to sell guitar pedals at local music stores in Seattle to make the most of my inventory: Aviary Electronics.