Parker Ferrer

PedalSwap is a startup modular guitar effects platform, geared towards giving beginner guitarists the freedom to experiment with their own tone and style at a low price point while enabling more advanced users with features to create a vast range of high-quality, intentional sounds. As the sole mechanical designer, I lead the physical development of PedalSwap as my team of 2 other founders and I have taken the product from an idea to a production-ready, user-friendly, attractive product.

I was first brought on to design the prototype mechanical architecture and integrate all the electrical subsystems: effectively, figure out how to make an enclosure and swappable control knobs around a pile of breadboard circuits usable and enjoyable. This rigorous early phase required extremely fast prototyping where my partners and I would talk through a couple iterations and ideas, and I would have them designed, 3D printed, and tested within the following couple hours over and over again for a week straight. The design only required functionality, so many of these ideas had us experimenting with broad concepts of how the user might interact with the product or what we could do to set ourselves apart from other products on the market. By the end of that week, with over a dozen iterations to the design and product made, our work culminated in a highly successful proof-of-concept that secured 2nd place at Georgia Tech's Idea to Prototype competition.

After the success of our competition and seeing the excitement of musicians and non-musicians alike at our showcase for the design, we decided to keep it going and compete in the Georgia Tech Inventure Prize. The priorities during this transition were turning this prototype into a real product, which meant prioritizing ergonomics, user experience, and attractiveness. I refined the 3D-printed magnetic connection system, allowing users to intuitively swap analog effect circuits in addition to the control knobs without managing complex wiring, and iterated this mechanism to allow for extremely natural use. This iteration transformed a raw functional prototype into an attractive, user-friendly consumer device, ultimately winning 2nd place, $10,000, and patent funding.

Now, the focus is on optimizing the platform for manufacturability at scale and reliability when exposed to real use conditions, while still maintaining the functionality and attractiveness developed in previous iterations. I am actively refining the system integration to ensure the final product cannot be damaged even under diverse use cases, can be sold at an affordable price point, and incredibly easy to assemble for us as a business. This process involves continuous failure analysis and part fabrication optimizations to balance a resilient mechanical design with an accessible, usable look and feel. Additionally, I am in the process of making engineering drawings for the patent filing for this device to make a claim on our invention.

Serving as the Team Lead and Mechanical Lead for a 15-member interdisciplinary team, I directed the overarching mechanical iteration of an autonomous competition robot as well as managing the project as a whole. I was responsible for designing the robotic structure and internal mechanisms, specifically speccing electrical design elements and power transmissions while also heading the CAD and mechanical design of the chassis and major interactive subsystems. Recognizing that software development was our most significant bottleneck, I optimized the electromechanical assemblies to simplify software production. I repeatedly went through rounds of increasing the complexity of mechanical and electrical design for the benefit of reducing the complexity of the control systems. This iteration, while bridging the gap in communication between the mechanical, electrical, and programming subteams, helped to overcome the lack of experience we had on our software team.

Additionally, I recognized from my previous year on the team (and from stories of the years before), that the greatest problem plaguing this project was simple communication breakdown as individuals became busy with schoolwork through their semester and the project deliverables started falling through the cracks. To overcome this, I implemented clear and strict project management protocols for our team. I facilitated close cross-functional collaboration, ensuring everyone consistently updated the team, met tight deadlines, and maintained alignment from the initial CAD models through to the final hands-on assembly of the system-level robot prototype. At the conclusion of the competition, UGA placed 8th out of ~45 teams, a huge improvement from about 30th the year before and tied for last the year before that.

Working within the UGA Cultivate Lab, a partner and I engineered a self-playing robotic guitar designed for adaptive instrumentation. Faced with a highly compressed timeline due to my partner transferring schools, I had to execute extreme rapid prototyping. Over the span of just a few days, I drove the project through three major design iterations and nearly a dozen smaller subsystem tests to ensure reliable strumming of the strings. The system heavily relied on precise electromechanical integration due to the nonuniform surfaces of a guitar and difficult to predict behavior of the strings. We repeatedly, directly assembled and tested the servo motor mechanisms to achieve consistent, autonomous strumming. This hands-on work involved continuous failure analysis and immediate physical refinement of the design assumptions to guarantee reliability under a repeated variety of testing conditions. This intense period of hardware development culminated in a fully functional, custom sub-assembly that met all project parameters despite the severe time constraints. The project not only proved the viability of the robotic mechanism but also served as the foundation for an autoethnographic research paper on project-based learning in electrical engineering, which I co-authored and presented at the ASEE 2025 Annual Conference.