WaldFlöte: midi controlled pipe organ
posted Nov 10th 2008 9:19am by Caleb Kraftfiled under: classic hacks, home hacks
Members of Dorkbot Edinburgh have done what most of us would do if we had a 19th century pipe organ. They hacked it to be midi controlled. The organ is located above a cafe owned by the university of Edinburgh. Students have been repairing and modifying it to get it back in working order.
The electronics are composed of an Xilinx Spartan-3E Starter Kit as the brains and a Microblaze processor converting midi events for the solenoids. The cool thing is that none of this required any permanent modification to the organ itself. It can all be removed to put the organ back in normal playing condition. Check out the video after the break for some classical Van Halen.
[thanks Jonas]
One interesting point is that this isn’t the first MIDI-controlled pipe organ. Some larger pipe organs, especially theater organs, were originally built with electric actions, so converting to MIDI isn’t much of a stretch.