Last spring, I went out and bought a nearly-40-year-old electronic church organ. It was enough of a period piece that its voicing was controlled by IBM cards - remember them? - and the organist who had owned it had a collection of a few hundred of them. Well, this system had a few drawbacks:
I had to keep the cards in order and hunt through the file to find the voices I wanted.
The cards, being 40-year-old paper, were starting to disintegrate.
Well, just after moving the organ into my house, one of the lamps in the card reader burnt out. I decided that changing out little incandescent lamps was going to be another annoying maintenance idem, and decided to replace them with LEDs (which, after all, last nearly forever). Well, as I was doing this, a light bulb came on over my head.
(No, this is 2010, an LED came on over my head, and someone should update that emoticon!) I could solve the other two problems at the same time by firing the LEDs as if a card were moving through the slot.A bunch of hackery later (reverse engineering the card code, figuring out how to digitize the cards without messing with the old electronics, that sort of thing), I had a keypad and display sitting on top of the organ letting me choose stops. Much more convenient than sticking IBM cards in a slot. It's built around a 4x20 LCD display, a telephone keypad, and an RBBB making a display terminal, and another RBBB inside the organ as an LED driver. Build log with details and lots of pictures start at http://dftscript.blogspot.com/2009/09/a ... eader.html.
As one colleague observed : "I get email all the time offering to revitalize an aging organ, but you've actually gone and done it."
