How I built PedalVault

I tinker with DIY guitar effects pedals. “Tinker” might be generous—it’s more like joyfully disappear into the vortex of solder fumes and tiny parts until I forget to eat lunch.

Truth be told, I think I enjoy building pedals more than actually playing through them. But here’s the problem no one warns you about: the sheer avalanche of tiny components you need to hoard, and the chaos of keeping track of them.

Do I have enough 100n capacitors? How about 1K resistors? Oh… I’m out? Fantastic. Now I’m justifying $8 shipping for a 10-cent part while my cart on Mouser looks like a joke someone forgot to finish.

That’s when an idea hit me: What if I slapped NFC tags on the little baggies and linked them to a spreadsheet? Tap the bag, see the count, live the dream.

A quick Google search later, I pinged my LLM buddy Claude with:

I would like to create a inventory of my diy guitar effect pedal parts with using NFC. So I can scan the nfc tag and enter in number to add or remove parts so I know what I have. I have an iPhone.

Claude handed me a neat little file that actually worked. Honestly, I could’ve stopped there. But no. I asked for another feature… and another… and before I knew it, I was debugging, tweaking CSS, poking at JavaScript, and tumbling head-first down the “scope creep” staircase.


By the time I came up for air, I’d somehow built a custom pedal parts inventory web app. And I’m not gonna lie—I’m proud of it. You can try it yourself at PedalVault.app. If you want to see the spaghetti that makes it run, the GitHub repo is wide open.

The app can:

  • Pull a bill of materials from JSON or CSV

  • Compare it to your inventory

  • Tell you exactly what you’re missing

  • Link you straight to the store pages so you can grab the parts you need

The catch? It runs on local storage. So if you clear your browser cache, poof, everything’s gone. That’s why it has an export option—save your data as JSON or CSV, and you can re-import it later (or transfer to mobile). There’s no cloud sync yet, so for now, you’re the sync engine. There’s no cloud sync yet for a reason—cloud servers are not as free as a cloud.

What started as “just slap an NFC tag on it” turned into a surprisingly capable little app… and a reminder that when you mix DIY projects with AI, you might just end up with something bigger (and cooler) than you planned.

Smooth Scroll
This will hide itself!