What did you do in high school? Chances are it wasn’t anywhere near as cool as turning a reed organ into a MIDI device. And even if you managed to pull something like that off, did you do it by mechanically controlling all 88 keys? Didn’t think so.
A reed organ is a keyboard instrument that channels moving air over sets of tuned brass reeds to produce notes. Most are fairly complex affairs with multiple keyboards and extra controls, but the one that [Willem Hillier] scored for free looks almost the same as a piano. Even with the free instrument [Willem] is about $500 into this project. Almost half of the budget went to the solenoids and driver MOSFETs — there’s a solenoid for each key, after all. And each one required minor surgery to reduce the clicking and clacking sounds that don’t exactly contribute to the musical experience. [Willem] designed custom driver boards for the MOSFETs with 16 channels per board, and added in a couple of power supplies to feed all those hungry solenoids and the three Arduinos needed to run the show. The video below shows the organ being stress-tested with the peppy “Flight of the Bumblebee”; there’s nothing wrong with a little showing off.
[Willem]’s build adds yet another instrument to the MIDI fold. We’ve covered plenty before, from accordions to harmonicas and even a really annoying siren.
Wheres Bach’s fuga in D minor? Wanna hear some chords
Perfect for ghost playing on horror movies!
Would an off the shelf solenoid driver board design also have worked instead? Might have been quicker and possibly cheaper.
ahh… but would that be as fun?
Creator here.
I designed my own boards for educational purposes (since I’m a high school student, I’ve never gotten a change to design a PCB before) as well as practical purposes. 15 of the boards cost $50 shipped to my door – hard to beat in price. There are actually no commercially available solenoid driver boards with large amounts of outputs. Using 88 single-channel boards would be messy and not cheap either.
Also, I got very efficient at populating the boards. I cranked out all 6 in only a couple hours – I could do about 2 solder joints a second once I got into the rhythm of it.
Organ companies have many driver boards and silent solenoids. The driver boards take midi and are addressable as instruments so many ranks can be controlled. The boards usually are in one octave strips and string in series. Still cool DIY.
I’d love to see that beast play Sandstorm, or Through the Fire and Flames :-P
I’m the creator :) I’ll film and upload it ASAP. Anyone else have any other requests? Please fill out this form here: http://bit.ly/2wR3QUE
Anything that ends up there I’ll film and add it to the playlist of videos.
I’m the creator of this project :)
If anyone has any song requests then please submit them here: http://bit.ly/2wR3QUE
I’ll film and upload them as soon as I can.
Also here’s a YouTube playlist showing all of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36Er-6ZRR6Q&list=PLbli1gTIi5kp9_iqoVi0sN5cbYPDn0naH
And please vote for my project in the contests on Instructables: https://www.instructables.com/id/MIDI-Controlled-88-Key-Reed-Organ/
Hello. I’ve tried uploading a few midi files I have created, intended for piano roll perforator use, but should work well on your instrument. The files are unable to upload, however. Is there a specific midi file type your submission page accepts exclusively? These would be much fun.
Hello. I’m using the Google forms file upload option… I just let it accept any file type; before it was set to only accept what it deemed as “audio” files. Try it again now.