johnh

Sadly, everything I owned was consumed by wildfire in California this past August. All my gear, tools, house, car, etc. This thread could be deleted.

Cleaning house and found a number of unbuilt SmashTV kits, cores, dins, douts, ains, etc. any interest? Boards, components, and PIC chips...

I've got a SmashTV core kit around here *somewhere*... I'm in the USA, not sure if that makes it feasible or not. ---john.

Thanks Tk! Now I'm working to get I've got the board split into two pieces using a 'box-cutter' and multiple passes.

After some futzing around I think I successfully loaded the MIOS32 bootloader. I don't have my parts from SmashTV yet so I can't test it (or can I?) so could someone confirm, the LED blinks three times and then goes off and then comes on and stays on. Is this what I should be seeing? Thanks.

I believe forum user Robin Fawell may have done the most work on using MIDIbox to create an organ. You might search his older postings and email him to see what the current status of his project is. The MIDIIO128 project provides a base (switch inputs, control outputs) that you could build on top of but offers little organ functionality (relay) on its own. Jim's suggestion of using jOrgan has merit. You may also want to search for the work of Trevor Dodd who used jOrgan and MIDIbox to operate a Wurlitzer theatre organ.

Download a PDF of the patent here: Patent 5567902

YAPPI boards handle 73 notes (outputs) per board. There is a mode to combine two boards into 'one' if you have a rank with more than 73 pipes. You might also want to look at the Artisan micro MIDI boards [Website Here] for an off-the-shelf solution that isn't too expensive. Of course you could implement all these ideas yourself with the MIDIbox which is the whole purpose here anyway! :smile:

I suppose it would be of some use, shared treble pipes for instance, but generally the character of ranks in a very small organ are different enough that re-using them in a combined rank wouldn't work too well. I think you could probably devote an extra YAPPI board to the combined rank although you might need to include diodes to prevent back-feeding the other boards. Might work.

Yes, the YAPPI board accounts for this. What the YAPPI board doesn't handle is borrowing where pipes from different physical ranks are combined to make a new rank. In the organs in which YAPPI has been used so far there hasn't been a need for that.

This type of 'borrowing' happens all the time in a unit rank. It's not clear to me how you could retrigger the pipe in real-time without some fore knowlege that the note was about to be played again. I suppose you could just turn off the note, wait a short time, and then turn it back on but then the attack would be delayed with respect to other notes unless you delayed everthing...

Thanks for the reference to the patent application. I read it on google here unfortuantely the pdf download is not available. I'll have to check with Craig on the current status of the coupling operation. I don't think borrowing is implemented at present if you mean synthetic stops created by combining two separate ranks of pipes. I'll ask Craig about that as well.

Craig Williams designed those boards. I believe Pete Knobloch has built boards using the same concept. The web page is a bit dated. The boards now repond to MIDI CC 80/81 (just like Miditzer and several other organ systems). And yes it does push the 'relay' to the chest. Each board listens to all the MIDI traffic and keeps track of which notes are being played on which channels. This is necessary to handle the case where a chord is being held and a stop change is made. The board responsible for that stop has to know if any notes are currently on and turn on the corresponding pipes. It can get pretty complicated!

Yes, we generally use one YAPPI board per rank of pipes. There is a mode where it can drive a straight (multi-rank) chest but flexbility is lost. In a home organ the number of ranks is usually fairly small and the cost of the YAPPI board per rank is relatively low in the grand scheme of things.