Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Hand made MIDI pipe organ from Maker Faire Orlando”.
My name is wendell capustiak and i brought a homemade player pipe organ. The most difficult part of building the organ is really the pipes. What i built here is 42 pipes, so three and a half chromatic octaves, and the reason that building the pipes is so difficult is that each one is different. So the thickness of the wood is different.
The width, the depth, the length of the pipe is different, and so there are no repetitive cuts or anything like that. Everyone has to be done one piece at a time, so this is a conventional pipe organ in the sense that the pipes speak. That is they play based on air pressure.
I took a blower, that’s used to cool data centers and and modified it so that it so it was quiet and enclosed and had a pressure regulator and then that the air pressure from that device feeds a sealed box. That’S referred to in the oregon business as a wind chest. The wind chest has in the bottom of it valves and when those valves open air passes from the wind chest into the pipes and the pipes speak now, the way those valves open is with these solenoids, that is their electromechanical switches and they pull the valves open. The the main processor is a raspberry pi sitting on top and it does two things one: it maintains a user interface so that i can select songs to play and the other thing it does is it feeds midi instructions essentially note on and note to off instructions To the arduino, because i have one pin assigned to each of the 42 notes that the organ plays and the duet has enough pins to do that. So the signals from the pins on the do-way then go through this transistor board and the transistor board just boosts the current and boosts the voltage to a level that will operate the solenoids when the solenoid is pulled again, based on a signal from the raspberry pi To the arduino to the transistor board, the solenoid pulls the valve open and the pipe speaks. People’S reactions have been interesting.
There are a certain number of them that that are just fascinated with the sound of it. You know the kind of old-school sound of a of a pipe organ and others are interested in the what i might call the melding of the 400 year old technology with the four-year-old technology. That is the pipe organ that’s been around since uh since well, the middle ages and the raspberry pi and the arduino and the and midi files and things that are uh are much newer.
I have a blog and it’s a wac rack, that’s w-a-k-r-e-c, dot! Blogspot.Com! You .