Free UPS + Free Batteries == Hammond Organ

September 27th, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

UPS that someone gave me because it didn’t work:

Minus its original batteries, apparently slightly past their prime, which I had to pry out of the case by levering with a big screwdriver:

Overheated gel cell batteries

Plus three-year-old unused batteries from the campus fire chief:

Equals I can play my “new” Hammond organ, which is temporarily in storage where there’s no electricity:

Worth noting:

Cold Start
When the UPS is off and there is no utility power, it is possible to cold start the UPS to power the loads from the UPS’s battery.
Note: Cold start is not a normal condition.
Press and hold the on/test button until the UPS begins beeping.
Release the on/test button during the beeping to start the UPS.

Addendum 29-Sep-2008:

Runtime with a 15W wall wart plugged in was about an hour. Runtime with the Hammond plugged in (after fully recharging) was about three minutes. I guess free batteries are worth what you pay for them . . . but I do now know that the UPS works and is worth replacing the batteries.

Posted in Hacks, Repairs | 3 Comments »

Project Idea: Clock with Sliding Hands

September 23rd, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

I saw this clock in a catalog last night:

I like 24-hour clocks; and I’m a computer geek, so I use 24-hour time for its unambiguity. And I like the visuals of this clock — but it’s functionally useless and/or made for idiots, as the 24-hour-ness of it is strictly cosmetic. It gives you no idea whatsoever whether it’s currently 07:00 or 19:00; it just has both numbers painted on, and the hour hand will point in the general direction of both.

How ’bout a clock with a face like this — numbers spiralling inward — and an hour hand that slides back and forth end to end across its axis as it turns, so that the end of the hour hand is always touching the marking for the correct hour? At 07:00, the hour hand is still slid most of the way to the outside of the clock and its end touches the 07; at 19:00, the hour hand has withdrawn further across the center of the clock and its end touches the 19.

Of course it’d need to be done with gears; I’m not talking about an LED or LCD clock.

Posted in Ideas | 4 Comments »

Interesting Bits of Old Motherboards

September 1st, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

I’m salvaging parts from some very old, dead (leaking capacitors and batteries, corroded components) PC motherboards and found some interesting bits.

ICs inside IC socket

14-pin ICs mounted inside a 40-pin IC socket (that was populated). Very cute. Makes me want to do something extra-naughty, like mount an SMT IC underneath a DIP (no socket needed).

18/20-pin IC sockets

18/20-pin IC sockets, so you could pick which size L2 cache chips to install. Although it’s not obvious from straight above, these are not hacked together out of regular sockets — they were manufactured this way.

I found them on two different vendors’ boards, and I had never noticed them when I was servicing PCs during that era. I guess it solves the problem of knowing which end of a regular 20-pin socket to stuff an 18-pin IC in; or maybe the 18-pin and 20-pin ICs didn’t have compatible pinouts.

Novell 8088 motherboard with onboard ethernet

A Novell 8088 motherboard with onboard ethernet. Various other curiosities are visible in the large version of the picture, but worth noting is the “PC TERM. BIOS,” which leads Joel to question whether this was a dual-function PC and network terminal.

Posted in Inside, Miscellaneous | 7 Comments »

Wire-Scrounging Challenge

August 5th, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

I brought my “Arduino on the go” along to New Mexico, but discovered I’d installed a pushbutton on the breadboard in a spot that was already wired to ground, making the button always “pressed.” In order to move it, I needed more jumper wires; and due to a combination of hurry and hubris, I had brought none along.

I needed some 24- to 26-gauge solid wire, in a cabin, on a mountain (excavaaaaaating for a mine). The nearest Radio Shack was twenty miles and about forty minutes away, and I couldn’t think of any store in Angel Fire likely to have wire for me.

So, where would you scrounge up wire in an emergency? I’m actually interested in suggestions — add them to the comments if you can come up with something other than my ideas. I didn’t have anything along that I could take apart for wire, I didn’t have a soldering iron to tin stranded wire, and I wasn’t willing to damage anything in the cabin, the car, or the area.

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Posted in Hacks, Salvage | 8 Comments »

Arduino on the Go

July 31st, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

A week-long vacation without the Arduino? The horror . . . the horror . . .

Arduino, LCD, and breadboard on foam-core sheet

Arduino, LCD, and breadboard strapped down on foam-core sheet, for travel.

Posted in Arduino | No Comments »

Refitting a Strain Relief

July 21st, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

My dad had a break in the power cord of his hair clipper, right next to the strain relief. That should be ironic, except I already know most strain reliefs are too stiff and just move the site of cable stress rather than relieve it. I guess that makes it ironic but expected.

At any rate, the strain relief was molded onto the cable, so the cord wouldn’t just slip out for repair; and the break was so close he didn’t know quite how to splice it back together; and he asked me to fix it for him.

Hair clipper strain relief with broken power cord

At first all I could think of was hideous things like replace the strain relief with a grommet and a huge wad of hot glue. But I let it sit for a day, and realized that the much easier solution would also be both cosmetically and functionally superior.

I cut off the power cord flush against the inner and outer ends of the strain relief, then drilled the power cord out of the center of the strain relief with progressively larger bits until the hole was large enough to push the cord through again. Super simple, and it leaves a very finished appearance — you can only tell it was repaired if you look closely.

It’s more obvious if you look inside, of course. The extra loop on the long wire really shouldn’t be there. I had both wires cut to the same length and spliced, and then the original short leg popped loose of the switch’s crimp connection and it seemed more practical to cut off the splice and fit the new end straight into the crimp. By then I didn’t feel like reopening and resoldering the long connection, so I just mushed it in and let it be.

Good enough.

Posted in Repairs | 4 Comments »

Arduino MIDI Volume Pedal

July 12th, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

I’m playing keyboards this fall in another rock concert to benefit the high school robotics team, and for some of the tunes I need to be able to fade an organ in and out over a period of a measure or two. My keyboards are velocity-sensitive, so if you hit the keys harder they play louder (like a piano); and they have aftertouch, so if you press down extra-hard on the keys you can get special effects. But there’s no good way to change the volume of their organ sounds dynamically, and these synths don’t have inputs for volume pedals.

This is the MIDI volume pedal project I was starting to work on when I took apart a Baldwin organ swell pedal and decided to leave it intact based on what I found inside. I got another analog volume pedal from a pile of unknown origin at the school lab and finished the job.

Homebrew MIDI volume pedal using Arduino

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Posted in Arduino, Circuits, Hacks | 20 Comments »

LED Calculator with Rotary Quadrature Encoder for Target System Voltage Selection

July 6th, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

LED calculator with rotary encoder for target supply voltage

I’m still working on the LED calculator (original idea and most recent work) — I’ve finally got ’round to adding a rotary encoder to set the target system voltage. Now you can turn the potentiometer to set the LED brightness, turn the rotary encoder to set what voltage will be used in the ultimate LED circuit, and read the LED voltage, current, and current-limiting resistor values off the screen.

I also found the Ω in my LCD’s character matrix, so I tidied up the display a little.

And most significantly, I wrote an Arduino library for reading (multiple) quadrature encoders. The simple approach of polling them inside loop() was causing me to lose a lot of steps from the encoders; and the code to read them using hardware external interrupts (lower on the same page) only works on digital pins 2 and 3, so only supports one encoder if both pins are wired to interrupts for the highest resolution, or two if interrupting on a single pin and polling the other.

My Quadrature library uses the TIMER2 overflow interrupt service routine to poll multiple encoders rapidly and track the results, supporting as many encoders as you have room for on the digital pins. It also encapsulates all the dirty work into the library code, so using it is as simple as

#include "Quadrature.h"

Quadrature myencoder1(9, 10);  //  Connected to pins 9 and 10

loop() {
  x = myencoder1.position();
}

It still has some rough edges and it’s by no means perfect (more on that below), but it sure makes it easy to use rotary quadrature encoders. It’s available on a new Downloads page for anyone interested.

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Posted in Arduino, Ideas | 32 Comments »

Swell Pedal from Baldwin Model 5 Organ

July 3rd, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

July 7, 2008

Welcome, MAKE: Blog readers!

Whoever posted this to the MAKE: Blog jumped the gun a bit — I haven’t interfaced anything to a synthesizer yet. What I found in the Baldwin pedal isn’t suitable for interfacing and is (in my opinion) worthy of preservation, so this post is just a teardown of the Baldwin pedal showing the intriguing mechanism inside.

I have since gathered all the parts I’m going to use to build the MIDI volume/expression pedal and expect to do that within a few days; so if you’re interested, please check back!

I want to build a volume pedal for my synthesizer(s), and I figured it’d be easier to do if I started with . .  a volume pedal. So last night I went to storage and pulled the swell pedal out of Jacob’s most recently discarded electric organ, a Baldwin Model 5.

Baldwin Model 5 organ swell pedal, front view

It’s actually quite a bit higher off the floor and more steeply angled than would really suit me; but I had it on hand and figured I might as well start working with it. As it turns out, I’m not going to retrofit this, and I’ll show you why in a little bit.

Baldwin Model 5 organ swell pedal, mechanism

Rocking the pedal forward pushes the square lever away from the box, and rocking it back pushes the lever toward the box and presses a pin at the base of the lever into the box.

Baldwin Model 5 organ swell pedal, electronics enclosure

The lever and box assembly looks kind of like a giant microswitch. Or a bird with a long neck.

Baldwin Model 5 organ swell pedal, electronics mechanism

Here’s the part that makes me say, “Wow.” Apparently potentiometers hadn’t been invented yet (I think I’m joking), or weren’t available with a high enough power rating to use in this volume control circuit.

The volume pedal’s lever presses against a ladder of leaf switches (it’s hard to see, but all the contacts at the left end of the leaves are normally open, but only barely) wired to a resistor ladder. Pressing the pedal connects together increasing numbers of leaves and shorts across increasing numbers of resistors. Wow, wow, wow.

I just don’t feel right about dismantling this to stick in a potentiometer (nor are the mechanics of it really built to make that easy).

So now I’m looking for another swell pedal (with a pot) to repurpose, ideally a twin swell pedal like what’s on Jacob’s current organ. I don’t find much on eBay, and I’m not sure where else to look.

Posted in Inside, Salvage | 15 Comments »

Free: Boxed Manuals → Cases for Prototyping On the Go?

June 25th, 2008 by Keith Neufeld

I’ve been saving these relics of the Information Age forever, initially because I had the computers to go with them, then out of nostalgia, then because I forgot I had them, and now because it seems like the boxes should be useful. But really, I’d just like them to go away.

Anybody want some three-ring binders with matching boxes, maybe to put an Arduino and breadboard in to take with you on vacation and play with circuits when you’re stuck in Saint-Tropez for a couple of weeks with nothing to do? The rings oughtta be good for holding baggies of parts, or something.

Seriously, if anyone wants any of these, they’re yours for the cost of shipping. The MS-DOS Operating System is missing one of the two volumes from the double-wide case; the Wordstar and Operating Instructions are intact in single-wides.

Posted in Arduino, Hacks, Miscellaneous, Salvage | 1 Comment »

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