i wonder if he could have done that with an arduino instead

that’s not something I’d do to a working (or fixable) organ. If it was broken beyond repair then it’s OK

this is stupid. i mean it doesnt even have any arduinos.

Shut up w/ the arduinos already and start your own blog dedicated only to arduinos. seeing as there usually hundreds of keys & pipes attached to those keys, i think that would take an unfeasible number of arduinos to accomplish.

@napalm
I get the feeling the arduinos comments are meant to be sarcastic.

And I totally aggree with tim, you just don’t do that to a working organ

To the guys bitching about it being arduino controlled, Have anyone actually seen the size of a theater pipe organ full installation or church organ for that matter? Do you understand the cost of these things and of maintaining these things?

My Father restores/maintains pipe organs for a living, Wurlitzer, Compton etc. We are talking around £50k for a decent one, have you got a spare room or 2 to house all the instruments? Those 32ft pipes ain’t small….. Then there’s sourcing the 1930′s parts, bakolite, leather and relays anyone?

My Father also installs virtual theatre pipe organs, does a lot of work with hauptwerk, either hooked up to original consoles or midi keyboards. All of his customers are heavily ‘into’ pipe organs and making the sound proper (hence the 42 speakers as well as decent soundcards to run it all), sometimes this is the only way to ‘save’ the console for the greater good as these things get neglected due to the high running costs/time to keep them maintained.

It’s the guys console and his Fathers memory, I say let him do what he likes. There’s very little actual hardware in the console itself, a few hundred relays for the keys,tab stops etc. and a electric/mechanical box which does all the signal routing and stores presets in ‘memory’, not far off what an ‘arduino’ can do, well, apart from be reliable like an arduino …..

It’s a mammoth task that he’s taken on and having worked on compton and wurlizter organs myself, I’d be more than happy to gut the innards of the console at least and drag it screaming and kicking into the reliable 21st century.

@reggie

Thanks, my first reaction was that this was heretical until you helped me realise what he actually had. I can rest easy now…

great project !!!

perhaps the automated musical works of Godfried-Willem Raes may provide some additional inspiriation ;-)

http://www.logosfoundation.org/instrum-god.html

I applaud this person’s project. A great deal of thought, effort, money, and personal investment is going into this, and I respect that. If nothing else, one should be impressed by the sheer magnitude of it, and that a single person would be tenacious enough to drive it to conclusion. And his motive?… To donate it! Again, well done, sir.

Higher quality photos of the console here
http://homepage.mac.com/clintonk/PhotoAlbum1.html

While it is true that pipe organs are not everyone’s cup of tea, in their heyday, they were appreciated by most people. It is also true that for cream of the crop design engineers and programmers, pipe organ design is not where the money is.

But what if you were a cream-of-the-crop phd in EE, extremely knowledgeable in computer design and chip design, and an uber-programmer to boot? You could do ANYTHING yourself and you could call it all your own. Ordinary people can’t and don’t do this kind of design project. There isn’t a sound set big enough for it yet, for crying out loud! And if your father was James R. Knight and here to see it, he would be encouraging you the whole time because he would know this project showcases many of the engineering talents the good LORD gave you and he would think it is just awesome!