Keyboard Project

AlanP

Years ago, Dad picked up a stuffed organ. Roughly 73 vintage. The power supply was completely munted and unrescuable, so we pulled it apart and the two keyboards went in the shed rafters (Dad's longterm "good stuff" storage, warm and dry.)

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Pulled one of them down. I forgot how dirty these things are. And before you say, this was stored in two thick plastic bags. This is exactly how it came off the organ.

Going to have to desolder this wiring harness, and stuff in some 100R 1% resistors.

This is how the mechanism works -- the brass-colour spring is pulled up against the lower buss bar when the key is pressed, and the end of the spring is attached to one of those many, many wiring points.

First job is cleaning it with a damp cloth. Next is to check it out electrically with the DMM. (I imagine that will involve some contact cleaning.) After that, solder time.

I have a strong suspicion that I will wind up getting a cheap n crappy casio and pulling that apart for it's keyboard, instead.

Grumble · Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 12:58 am Post subject:

Nice! I got an electronic organ for free some time ago with the idea to take out the rhythm box but it was so heavily integrated into the organ that it was impossible for me to make a stand alone unit out of it.
I remember the keys looked the same as you show us here, and looking at those I decided to throw a way the complete organ...
The only parts I saved were the foot pedal of which I made a midi foot pedal for my brother and the 30 cm long spring reverb tank Laughing

For a keyboard I bought a full size midi keyboard (I think it was a target) for 7.5 euro.
This keyboard was internally divided into two pcb's with each holding half the keys, great for two small midi keyboards with about 2 1/2 octave each. I added a switch for more octaves as can be seen in my avatar.
A small demo of the 13 key foot pedal midi box (My brother forgot that the arduino I used was configured to mimic a true midi device...)
https://youtu.be/ujMXjMngTbg

PHOBoS · Posted: Tue Jun 06, 2017 1:58 am Post subject:

good luck with it alan Very Happy

AlanP · Posted: Sat Jun 24, 2017 8:39 am Post subject:

Made a start on checking the contacts. So far, so good, but I need to cut the wiring harness off to check more than half of them.