Chipophone Plays Video Game Classics

July 22, 2010 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

This thrift shop organ gets a new life as an 8-bit music maker. Called the Chipophone, it relies on an ATmega88 to produce sounds that you might associate with classic video gaming. [Linus Akesson] takes us through all of the different sound settings in the video after the break, including performances of your theme music favorites.

The original organ uses transistor logic making it rather easy to patch into the hardware. Thanks to the build log we know that [Linus] used 74HC165 input latches to monitor each of the switches for the 120 inputs. Fifteen of these latches work like a backwards shift register 74HC595, cascading all of the parallel inputs into one serial signal. From there the microcontroller takes over, monitoring the keys, pedals, switches, and potentiometers and outputting the appropriate sounds.

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James R. Knight Memorial Organ

August 13, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

IMG_1613 (Custom)

[Jared] wanted to do something monumental to commemorate his late father. His idea was to take this organ console and convert it to a digital beast powered by Hauptwerk software. The project is slated to take 18 to 24 months to complete, at which point he’s going to donate it to his church. You can follow along as he guts it and replaces all the mechanicals with new parts to interface the computer. He also finds that he needs at least 42 individual speaker cabinets to achieve the sound he wants. This thing is massive, we would love to see it in person.

WaldFlöte: Midi Controlled Pipe Organ

November 10, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 7 Comments

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.

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Playing The Building With David Byrne

June 3, 2008 by Juan Aguilar 3 Comments

Do you remember the solenoid concert that used a sequencer to control several solenoids striking different surfaces? Musician David Byrne has taken the concept and executed it on a much larger scale with his “Playing the Building” installation in an old municipal ferry terminal in New York. Devices that bang the girders, rattle the rafters, and blow through the pipes of the building are attached to the only object inside, a weathered pipeorgan. Every key is wired to different device in the building, each producing a unique sound. Attendees are invited to fiddle with keys of the organ to produce sounds from the building’s various materials, thus playing the building like an instrument. Here’s a video from the installation.