Loop the Chop

In this project, I built a looping system inside a 3D-printed box and used it to record and playback the chopping sound on a cutting board in real-time.

The interaction with the cutting board when preparing the food is usually humdrum because of the repetitive chopping movement. The objective of this project is to make users enjoy the fun and beauty of beats while cutting food materials, whether they have drum background or not.

The hardware of the looping box includes a microphone, a foot pedal, a NeoPixel Ring and Teensy 4.0 with audio shield.

The first loop starts to record when the foot pedal is pressed and ends recording when users step on the pedal again. The loop length would always be the same after the first layer, which means the recording of other layers would end automatically without pressing the pedal. The NeoPixel tracks the timing of the loop. When users press the pedal in the middle of playback to add another layer, it would wait until the beginning of the loop to record. There is no maximum of layers.