My Virtual Organ Project

[Aduragbemi]

Please pardon those wrong pedal notes 😅😅😅😅

[gtc]

Looks great. Sounds great. All round, a job very well done.

[Coenraads]

Congratulations! You have now officially earned you organ playing shoes. Considering you have never played an organ with pedal before, you are off to a great start. This whole project represents an amazing achievement and shows what can be done with dedication and ingenuity.

I think I can speak for everyone on the Forum. Well done.

[Aduragbemi]

A week after and the pedal setup is still working fine. I have been stomping it daily with the best dress shoe I got. It's high time I got a proper organ shoe and had a formal organ lesson. ?

I have invited some organists that I know to come around and have a feel. When they come I will make videos and with their permissions upload here.

I'm going to readjust the kneeboard to make way for the swell/crescendo shoes, and add some momentary switches as temporary toe studs while at it. Thumb pistons - those will be done as well.

[Philip Powell]

How quickly you have been able do things amazes me and you're always onto to the next step - a great gift.

[gtc]

You now have the perfect setup for organ lessons. Getting to know some of the classical repertoire should increase your enjoyment of the scope of capabilities of your VPO.

[Aduragbemi]

VPO PROJECT UPDATE


Crescendo shoe is mounted "slightly" higher on a quarter inch thick plywood. Any thought (is it just right or too high)?

Kneeboard in place. There is also a sliding platform for the computer keypad and mouse, but it's not shown in this picture (zoom in the next pictures to catch a glimpse).


Closed position


Open position


The side view, showing the "slight" elevation of the crescendo shoe.

I will install rubber sheet (or any other appropriate material) on the shoe surfaces, felt strip on the limits and under the shoes where they make contact with the limits, and trims on the cut edges.

[Larason2]

I think it looks fine. I know many people prefer the crescendo pedal elevated, but I'm in the camp that thinks it should be an ordinary pedal. Many organ builders build it like this. It's a bit more flexible for Hauptwerk or GO too, where you may not always want it to be the crescendo pedal. But everyone has an opinion! If it is elevated, how high it should be elevated doesn't really matter too much. The idea is you should be able to feel which pedal it is with your feet without looking.

[Aduragbemi]

The expression pedal unit installed (picture also showing the retractable platform for the keypad and mouse).

The potentiometers are the volume slides of the M-Audio MIDI Keyboards that I used for the manuals. I extended their cables with 24AWG appliance wires, same as the ones I used to wire the pedalboard. Both ends terminate on a 9-pin socket, so I connected the 3-pin of each pot to the socket using male-to-male DuPont cable (seen in the picture below, coming out of a hole behind the expression pedals unit). At the other end, also via DuPont cable, I connected them to three matching 3-pin wires, which fit into the respective volume slide port on the manuals' PCB.

I powered up the VPO, and configured the shoes at the Panel menu in GrandOrgue. The swells worked as expected, but I have not gotten a hang on how to configure the crescendo properly. The crescendo adds stops as I ascend, but on descent, the stops that are drawn before also go off, unlike what should occur on a real organ.

I'm still searching for the proper way to configure the crescendo. Anyone who knows how to do this should kindly share. Thank you in advance.

[Aduragbemi]

GRANDORGUE CRESCENDO: UPDATE

The Crescendo Panel now has and OVERRIDE switch. When the switch is off, manually-drawn stops will be unaffected by crescendo/decrescendo.

[Aduragbemi]

I cut the vertical plates at the front end of the natural keys, in preparation for piston installation. Only the middle 5-octaves need trimming; the keys of the "stop" sections are left untouched - they will be hidden anyway.

I have done this on the 3rd manual replacement, but I'm not ready to dismantle the manuals for trimming, because I enjoy playing the organ daily with the pedalboard.



BTW, it's almost a month now and I have not had a single issue with the pedalboard.

[Aduragbemi]

Happy Independence Day to my American friends.

[tbeck]

Nicely done. Thank you.

[gtc]

Nicely played. I really like the Friesach organ.

[Philip Powell]

Woohoo!!! God bless the US of A!!!

[Aduragbemi]

PROPOSED THUMB PISTON SETUP



Proposed piston arrangement as follows

Set and General Cancel are the first and last pistons under the 1st manual, positioned at 38mm distance from the ends of the rail.

Generals (10, in group of 5 under 2nd and 3rd manuals) and Manual Divisionals (6 per manual) at the usual positions. The first divisional pistons are directly under Middle C.
Pedal Divisionals (4) below the Generals, under the 1st manual.

Couplers are between the Generals (or Pedal Divisionals under the 1st manual) and the Manual Divisionals. Manual-to-pedal couplers to the left of the divisionals, and the rest are intermanual couplers.

Sequencer Next pistons to the right of the Manual Divisionals on each manual. These are followed by the Tremulant pistons to the right.

The rest of the pistons to the right (groups of 4s and 2s) can be programmed for various functions - Tutti, Supercouplers/Subcouplers, Memories, Transpose, Record/Play/Stop, Zimbelstern, etc - depending on the samplesets in use.

Groups of pistons are separated by 50mm. Within each group, the pistons are separated by 28mm.

The pistons will be wired in parallel to an Arduino Mega, powered by John Coenraads Parallel Code. The code can accommodate a maximum of 64 digital inputs and I plan to use them all. So, we shall have 64 pistons in total.

[Aduragbemi]

I marked the position of the center of the pistons on the rails, and drilled with 12mm diameter hole saw.

I made a serious mistake when drilling the rows on the 1st rail, and I don't have a spare. Fortunately the rail is wider. I flipped the rail and made another row with the correct measurement. I will cover the row that has the error with a matching trim.



Installing the push buttons and wiring them to Arduino to follow soon.

[Aduragbemi]

I have trimmed the natural keys to make way for the incoming thumb pistons.

[Aduragbemi]

Toe Studs

While preparing to wire the pistons, I felt the need to do the toe studs along.

Here's what I'm improvising for toe studs: 30mm diameter momentary push button, screwed down into the base of an angled lamp holder.



Will they work? Yes, I'm certain they will.

Will they last? Really, I don't think so. There must be reasons why toe studs are made of brass or other metals, and durability must be one of them. That's why they can't be cheap. Anyway, they are not easily available here. So let me stretch my DIY imagination a bit, and enjoy my One-Dollar-Disposable-Plastic-Toe-Studs while they last, or until Providence brings the real toe studs my way.

[Coenraads]

Your ingenuity and creativity never ceases to amaze me. Press, don't stomp, and these should work just fine.
Well done.

[gtc]

Interesting combination there!

The quality of the switch contacts is usually important. (Contact bounce can be a concern for some applications.)

[Aduragbemi]

it has been quite a while... I have been busy with some other engagements. All along, I finally decided the toe stud arrangement - 10 studs to the left, in two rows of 5; and 8 studs to the right, in two rows of 4. There are 18 toe studs in total. Too many I'd say, but that's not much issue because they are inexpensive and there are up to 32 input pins available on the pedalboard Arduino to accommodate them.

[SJV]

Truly ingenious work, I take it they are sturdy enough and are holding up well?

[Aduragbemi]

I have not wired them up. When I do, I hope they'll do well.

[Larason2]

I like the toe studs too! As long as you don’t bash them, they should hold up. The metal ones are made the way they are so that if someone really bashes them with their foot they won’t break. The lamp holder should be ok, but the plastic button will crumble if really bashed.

[Aduragbemi]

Hello there! It's been ages that I gave an update on this particular project - my very first home-made VPO console. That is because actually I have not done anything about it since the last update. At a stage during the construction, I was kinda dissatisfied that it was not going to be easily portable. Hence I decided to build another VPO, a smaller one, that will fulfil this desire. The process is documented here https://organforum.com/forums/forum/...-vpo-project-2

The original VPO-2 is also unfinished, because I diverted many of its resources into finishing the Memorial VPO-2B. I also used some resources from this organ to complete the latest project, including the desktop computer, the Arduino Mega for the thumb pistons, 10 thumb pistons and 2 toe studs (I never got the pistons and studs wired anyway). Now that that one is completed and out of my crib to a friend's church for the next one month, I want to focus on making this VPO functional again and drive the project to a conclusion.

[Aduragbemi]

I got another computer for this VPO.


Specifications
HP EliteDesk 800 G2 DM.
Processor Core i5 - 6500T CPU @ 2.5GHz, 4 cores.
8GB DDR4 RAM @ 2133MHz - definitely I will expand to at least 16GB.
256GB SSD hard disk.
6 USB ports.
Windows 10 OS

[myorgan]

That should serve your purposes for a day or two! ;-) Thanks, as always for sharing your build progress and the accompanying stories. It's nice to see a pocket of VPO and organ music on the coast of Nigeria. I envy your progress with the organs in just under a year. I'm ashamed my garage has taken over 4 years!

Michael