Building Creative Content

 Stop Action For the St John's practice organ, I'm using some old LRT3 (lighted rocker tablets)  actions that I had for my old organ before I upgraded to moving drawknobs.  These were pre-USB design from MIDIWorks.  The existing interface was cumbersome, and not well documented, so I decided to reverse engineer the rockers and repurpose an existing board from my system to integrate it with the rest of the key and stop scanning system. The LRT's were simply a diode isolated 4x8 matrix of switches, and a serial shift register to drive the LED's behind the rockers.  The 8 on/off switches and 8 LEDs are duplicated into 2 groups.  Because there are only a single row of 2.54mm pins, it's easy to put a ribbon cable connector on it.  I have a board design (same as in the previous post) where I can allocate 8 port pins on one connector for the D bus and 16 port pins on another connector for the C interface, one set of 16 rockers on the odd pins and one set of 16 rockers on t

 For a lot of years now I've been developing electronics, techniques, and designs to optimize designs for digital organs.  With my partner Jon Orwig of Evensong Music , we have developed some amazing sample sets of American instruments.  We're super happy with this part of our business. I've been developing electronics to create MIDI interfaces for digital organs for the last several years.  The designs have had many iterations, but I'm narrowing down to a pretty optimized design.  This review is for a practice/teaching instrument for St. John's Lutheran church in Orange, CA.  The plan is for a 3 and pedal manual instrument using our St. Olaf, Minneapolis sample set.  One challenge for this instrument is that it's going in the music office, which is a house built in the 1920's, and has very narrow doorways.  A traditional case, even ones that are designed to go through 32" doors, will not work for this application.  A "flat pack" design has t