Load-in at theNAT

Here's what Organ Donor looked like loaded onto the freight elevator for setup at the Natural History Museum.

Setup and Configuration at STEAM Maker Festival

Organ Donor Opus 1.2 was set up in record time for the STEAM Maker Festival at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. We had just three hours on Friday and an hour and a half on Saturday morning before the event, for a total of 4.5 hours. The previous record was about 6 hours.

We were able to drive both vehicles right up to the installation site, so very little time was spent carrying parts back and forth. Plus, Richard was there to help.

Over the last few installations, Abraxas has developed a more systematic procedure for placing the air tubes between the wind chest and the pipes. She starts by sorting the tubes by length, and puts the shorter ones in the back. This results in a more orderly arrangement, and less struggle to make all the tubes reach.

Since the last installation, Paul has created a software assistant for configuring the system to match the installation of the tubes. For past installations, we have written the mapping from wind chest to pipes in a notebook, painstakingly checked it over manually for errors, and then manually pressed keys on the manuals to send the programming sequence to the MTP8 MIDI-to-parallel converters in the wind chest. Any error in the latter procedure meant starting over. Now, we press keys on the manuals to tell the software assistant about the mapping. Any duplicate entry is immediately detected and easily corrected. When all the data has been entered, sending the programming sequences to the MTP8s is fully automatic.

The photo shows the screen of the configuration assistant after all the mappings have been entered. I wanted to record the data before doing anything else, just in case there was a problem.

Organ Donor Successfully Completes Deployment at Burning Man

Organ Donor successfully completed a deployment at Burning Man 2015 as part of Sol Diego's Wonderlust Arcade installation. The five-day deployment was located with 28 other regional projects under tents at the base of The Man. The “Midway” was open 24 hours a day from event start until 5pm Friday before the burn.

The Wonderlust Midway installation included a forced perspective building and a variety of arcade and midway games and a Zoltar booth. Games were designed and built by members of the Sol Diego team. An article about the forced perspective construction and the games can be found at:

http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/article-14497-sol-diego-brings-immersive-art-to-burning-man.html

Setup took Organ Donors Paul and Abraxas about 8 hours over two days to complete, including ferrying components and tools out to the Midway (with a 5 mph speed limit). Conditions were windy and dusty, with visibility falling to zero at times. Organ Donor setup had to work with and around all the other teams setting up their art installations.

Substantial changes to the console and software were made from the previous deployment. A new console design was introduced. The minimum desired software functionality was completed on the second day, about an hour before event start. More ambitious software plans, including touchscreen support and graphical user interface features, would have to wait for a later deployment.

The new organ console (version 2.0) improved stability and function. Sturdy legs from IKEA, a cut down IKEA tabletop, and a custom laser-cut cabinet were key elements of the new console, replacing the lightweight folding stage stand and small custom control panel. The console would no longer tip over (or blow away!) as easily, and had improved aesthetics. The two manuals (that is, organ keyboards) and MIDI combiner and coupler management software were carried over from version 1.0 of the console. Version 2.0 added a sheet music stand, an LCD touch-screen, a selector knob, and a laser-engraved diagram to label and explain the stops and coupler buttons. The touch-screen and selector knob were managed by a Raspberry Pi 2 with software written in Python, and the active coupler diagram was managed by an Arduino MEGA 2560.

No substantial changes were made to the pipes, racks, windchest, or blower box. A minor rearrangement of the pipe positions around the rack was necessary to accommodate the shape of the limited space available.

The first failure was with the windchest, which is made of laser-cut acrylic. The front bottom left edge of the windchest leaked during the first pressurization. While the proper solvent-based acrylic cement could be purchased from Reno, that would involve a lengthy trip. Fortunately, Organ Donor Bigun had acrylic cement in his kit. We borrowed a tube, applied the cement, and clamped the windchest closed. This seam held for the duration of the event, possibly because we left the clamps in place. Organ Donor Bigun recommended the addition of a square acrylic rod glued along the seam on the inside of the windchest as a reinforcement. Since the seam is somewhat long, this reinforcement would reduce the amount of flex that probably caused the seam to pop.

The second failure was of both keyboards. When tested after a few hours of dust storm during setup, about half the keys on both manuals were no longer working. We suspected dust fouling the contacts inside the keyboard. With the dust storm continuing and worsening, the keyboards were removed and taken back to Copper Home, Organ Donor's support trailer at Wonderlust Camp. The keyboards were disassembled and inspected. Each key has a series of blue rubber boots that provide domes for each key to press down upon. A contact beneath each dome is actuated when the dome is compressed. Dust had worked its way beneath the rubber boots. The factory design looked more than adequate for normal conditions, but wasn't up to being inundated with playa dust.

A repair was proposed. We would thoroughly clean the contacts and the rubber boots, then use silicone sealant to completely seal the dust boots to the circuit board. The rest of the interior of the keyboard would be allowed to collect dust. Since the rest of the keyboard consisted of mechanical action and the components on the circuit board, confidence was high that the repair would work.

Both dusty keyboards, and the clean pair of backup keyboards, were treated with silicone sealant. In order to replace the dust boots, tool improvisation was required. The rubber plugs that anchor the dust boots would not fit back into the holes by finger pressure. Very small holes were observed at the top of each of the rubber plugs/feet. An unwound paper clip worked perfectly to refit the rubber anchor feet. The strip of dust boots was placed in the correct position, then the paper clip gently pressed into the hole over the top of each plug/foot. The foot then slipped into the hole with no difficulty.

Photos can be found here:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/w5nyv/albums/72157658511444682

After the keyboards were treated with sealant, they were returned to the console in the Midway. On the final day, one of the repaired keyboards failed, with just two keys no longer responding to key presses. This was swapped out for one of the backup keyboards. This keyboard worked the rest of the day until close of Midway. The other repaired keyboard lasted the entire event without failures. Later examination showed that we left gaps in the silicone sealant at each of the places where keys failed.

Software functionality for the Midway exhibit consisted of two modes, keyboard and jukebox. Jukebox mode was where Organ Donor played files from the songs directory in the Raspberry Pi. Keyboard mode was where the participant played the keyboard. Participants could play the keyboard at any time, but keyboard mode turned off any MIDI signals being sent to the windchest from the Raspberry Pi.

The Organ Donor received overwhelmingly positive feedback. Conservatory students, amateur musicians, and people that don't have any experience playing a keyboard all were encouraged to play Organ Donor.

One participant, Anthony Decognito, made up songs extemporaneously about other participants. He inquired as to their city of origin, made up a melody, and improvised a song. This was hugely successful.

Several pop-up concerts were held by people that happened to have large amounts of music memorized. The team greatly appreciated the willingness of so many participants that freely shared their talents and training. Crowds gathered in waves to listen and play.

The jukebox mode was freely used. While several lost and found items were recovered, no obvious abuse occurred. While at least one participant used a very unconventional body part to play the keyboard, Organ Donor was unscathed by heavy participant use.

Complete set of photos from the deployment can be found here https://www.flickr.com/photos/w5nyv/albums/72157656113224673

We found that most people didn't really study the coupler diagram, and were generally unwilling to read the verbose text-mode displays on the LCD to understand how to switch between keyboard and jukebox modes. This wasn't entirely surprising, but it did spark some discussion and decisions on how to improve the console for version 3.0.

With some strategic text placement, the coupler diagram could perhaps be improved to the point of not requiring a lot of explanation. During exhibition, it did not take much additional explanation to make the coupler diagram come alive, but the fact that it did take some additional explanation at all means there is room for improvement in this particular interface. Plans are in place to improve this particular interface for San Diego Maker Faire (3-4 October 2015).

For the LCD screen that showed status and gave instructions for jukebox vs. keyboard mode, it was felt that a big image on the screen and callouts on the knob would improve ease of operation.

Upon return to San Diego, the blower box, windchest, and pipes were cleaned with compressed air and damp cloths, and Organ Donor was set up for San Diego Maker Faire improvements.

Anyone interested in the project is welcome to follow along and is invited to consider becoming an Organ Donor. The project needs skills of all types, including machine learning, coding, user interface design, game theory, carpentry, laser cutting, 2D and 3D modeling, 3D printing, and many other areas. Contact Abraxas or Paul by sending a message through this site.

Organ Donor opus 1 at Borrego Days Desert Festival

Two Sol Diego Artists Collaborative projects that previously appeared together at YouTopia 2014, Sol Pyramid and Organ Donor, were successfully installed for the weekend at the Borrego Days Desert Festival in Borrego Springs, California.

Held 24 – 26 October 2014, the 49^th annual festival celebrated the people and culture of Borrego Springs.  Live entertainment, astronomy demonstrations, contests, shopping, food, and art were features of the event, with a very popular parade rolling down the center of town on Saturday morning.

Borrego Springs is located in the middle of Anza Borrego State Park. It’s an unincorporated area of San Diego County with a long and colorful history. First homesteaded in 1875, busy during World War II due to war efforts activities, favored by Hollywood stars as a getaway during the 1950s, Borrego Springs became California’s first Dark Sky Community in 2009.

Sol Pyramid lead David Timms was invited to bring the Pyramid to Borrego Days after organizers saw the video of the Pyramid from YouTopia. Organ Donor enthusiastically agreed to accompany the Pyramid as an installation.

The site was located on the main street a short walk from Christmas Circle in downtown Borrego Springs. The lot was cultivated three years ago as an urban garden, with plantings of Ocotillo and Pallas Verde trees. The trees are well established and provide an extremely pleasant site. Efforts were made during the installation to preserve and protect the trees and the site in keeping with common sense and the Burner ethic.

The Pyramid construction began at 6pm Friday evening and lasted until 2am Saturday morning. Organ Donor construction began at 8:00am Saturday and concluded at 2:00pm Saturday. Programmed LED lighting repurposed from a 2012 Sol Diego project was installed on the Pyramid structure before sunset on Saturday. This represents decreased Borrego Days construction time for both projects compared to YouTopia.

Hours of Construction Time

Project	YouTopia	Borrego Days	Percent Change
Sol Pyramid	16	8	-50%
Sol Pyramid Lighting	3	2.5	-17%
Organ Donor	10	6	-40%

The liaison for communications about Borrego Days was David Timms. David provided substantial assistance and support to Organ Donor in terms of housing and offered reimbursement for the unplanned travel expense of renting a UHaul truck when Organ Donor’s tow vehicle failed Friday morning. David reported excellent communications from Borrego Days organization.

The construction site was essentially identical to the site at YouTopia, being level packed humus-free earth and small stones, directly accessible from a paved road.

Organ Donor worked well throughout the event, aside from a few fuses blown when participants tried to play too many notes simultaneously (just as at YouTopia). One of the eight strands of LED lighting failed to light up after installation, and on-site debugging attempts were unsuccessful.

The relatively short notice prevented substantial or coordinated advance advertisement. The groups that potentially missed out, according to the members of the public that visited the installation, were school groups and bands that participated in the parade. With more advanced notice, collaboration could have potentially moved the encounter with the art from being entirely within the “delightful surprise” category to occupy a bit more of the “planned presentation” rubric. However, this distinction is not necessarily an improvement. The sheer surprise of seeing a large LED-illuminated Pyramid arise in the center of town, and then disappear only two days later, is in keeping with the spirit of the endeavor and was entirely successful in surprising and delighting the steady stream of visitors.

And, surprised and delighted they were. Reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Visitors were welcomed by installation staff during the entire time the installation was deployed, with extended hours on Saturday evening.

Serving as docents were Organ Donor Paul, Organ Donor Abraxas, and Organ Donor Richard. Education about organ pipes, blower boxes, windchests, software, embedded processor control, machine learning, and direct electric action was provided.

Visitors were present in small groups and couples for almost the entire time the installation was open. Foot traffic came by at such a rate that extended conversations were possible. Multiple contacts were made involving potential future involvements and opportunities for Sol Pyramid as well as Organ Donor. Sol Diego made a very successful outreach into a non-burner community by participating in this festival.

The most significant contacts in terms of future opportunities were with the chair of NWEAMO festival, a teacher involved in founding a new Maker-based school in Escondido, a burner named Wobbly who is interested in founding a burner event on private land in the desert near Borrego Springs, and the chair of the Daffodil festival in Julian.

The next planned adventure for Organ Donor is the STEAM Festival at Del Mar Fairgrounds on 6 December 2014.

Video: Organ Donor opus 1 debut at YouTopia 2014

link to recording

Organ Donor Opus 1 at YouTopia 2014

YouTopia is the official San Diego Burning Man Regional event. Held annually in October at the La Jolla Indian Campground, it draws several thousand people each year to a festival of music and art. A Center Camp, dozens of theme camps, individual camping, and RV camping are placed along the narrow lacework of unpaved roads within the campground. 

The part of San Diego where YouTopia is held is located in the foothills of Palomar Mountain. There are trees and seasonal streams, poison oak and bees. Nighttime skies are very dark despite being well within striking distance of San Diego. Overnight temperatures are lower than near the coast with daytime temperatues largely equivalent. Mist, fog, and rain commonly occurs during the festival from hill effect, but is usually light. 

Sol Diego artists collective (http://www.sol-diego.org) applied for and was placed as a theme camp. YouTopia city planning divided the event into areas based on, among other factors, how loud the sound camps were intended to be. We were located in Darwin, near the entrance. This was intended to be one of the quieter areas, and it worked out that way for us. 

Sol Diego Theme Camp provided the Sol Pyramid, Organ Donor,  and the colaser cutter workshop by Paul with demonstration of work products. Brandie Maddalena presented her program of You Are The Art at YouTalks. Brandie was also a lead for the YouTopia Temple project, which was constructed at colab and built for YouTopia.

Early entry was on Wednesday, 15 October 2014. We arrived with Organ Donor packed in the travel trailer and tow vehicle in the evening. Part of Sol Pyramid has already arrived. The remainder arrived Thursday, 16 October. The pyramid was completed late Friday afternoon, 17 October. Physcial construction of Organ Donor took from late Friday afternoon until 1:00am Saturday, 18 October. Configuration of the MTPs, the controllers that translate MIDI commands into signals for the solenoids, took about 90 minutes on Saturday morning, 18 October. This step is necessary in order to map the randomly assigned pipes to the holes in the windchest. 

This shortened schedule was not ideal, as it gave only a day and a night of demonstration. The idea of arriving early, on Wednesday, was to set up and get several days worth of experminatation, modification, and feedback. The intended schedule was not met due to the size of the pyramid and the dependence on a mechanical lift to construct it on site. 

Despite the limited time, several hundred people came to the pyramid and played with, listened to, and talked about the Organ Donor. The feedback was valuable, and the project received favorable reviews. 

Organ Donor opus 1 as deployed at YouTopia 2014 had an eight-foot and a four-foot rank. The upper keyboard, in the pair of keyboards, played the four-foot rank. The lower keyboard played the eight-foot rank. Organ Donor Paul created a console and a controller that allowed registration to be selected by the operator. By pressing LED-backlight buttons, the operator could select single notes, select notes plus an octave above, select notes plus an octave below, select notes plus an octave above and an octave below, and crosslinking to the other rank. The console case was cut out of quarter-inch plywood on the colab laser cutter.

The pipes were not tunable as deployed. They were cut to calculated length and their pitches measured. Results were recorded in a spreadsheet. Results showed that the pipes were all consistently flat. When played together, some intonation issues were heard, but the overall tuning effect was acceptable.  

A small number of pipes did not play (were silent) at the designed wind pressure. The pipes were correctly connected and the solenoids observed to be working. All of these pipes could be manually played, but were quiet or required substantially more pressure to sound. It was therefore not suprising that the regulated pressure from the windchest did not sound them. These pipes will probably have to be re-cut.  

The smallest pipes had the most fallout, with the 4-foot rank suffering the most attrition in the highest notes. All pipes could be manually played, but at 2 inches of wind pressure, several were unexpectedly silent.

The largest pipes were quieter than expected but all successfully sounded.

During windchest construction, ciphers (valves that don’t completely close) were observed and tracked in a spreadsheet. Efforts were made to improve the seal between the pallet pad and the hole of the windchest. This greatly reduced, but did not completely eliminate, the number and severity of the ciphers. 

During deployment, when ciphers were identified, larger pipes were assigned to the ciphers. Since the volume of air required to sound larger pipes is larger than the volume of air required to sound smaller pipes, putting larger pipes on the ciphers succeeds in reducing or eliminating the irritating sound that a constantly playing pipe can cause. Two holes were not successfully reassigned, so the pipes were dropped from the ranks. 

During MIDI file playback, where the MIDI commands come from a file rather than an operator playing the MIDI keyboards, problems were observed. We saw that there were notes that stayed on. After printing out messages to the console and comparing the messages sent from the file to the messages interpreted by the console controller, it was observed that, occaisionally, “note off” MIDI messages were not appearing. The root cause was not identified until after returning to San Diego. The missing messages were from what appeared to be a misconfiguration between the MIDI conversion cable and the MIDI driver, and not code in either the computer playing the files, or the Arduino at the heart of the controller that arbitrates which MIDI messages are passed through to the MTPs. 

Fuses blew several times when operators played large numbers of notes. The fuse was set to a conservative level in order to protect the equipment. While easy to change out, it did interrupt a recital of Phantom of the Opera and a wide-ranging version of Heart and Soul among other works. The number of simultaneous notes allowed to be played is controlled by the Arduino arbitration controller in the console. The fuse selection for the weekend was below this software limit. It was not expected that the current consumption would reach this level, and observations of the meter supported this assumption. It is quite possible that startup currents were the reason for fuse wear. A review of current consumption controls, power supply design, and protection circuitry is ongoing.

Operators greatly enjoyed playing the Organ Donor opus 1. The instrument was busy the entire time it was available, all day Saturday and late into Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Operators were enthusiastic and spread the word. The demogrpahics of the event resulted in a large number of trained keyboard players, music theoreticians, other makers, and interested programmers. Outreach from Sol Diego Organ Donor to the local Burning Man community was successful. 

It was decided that the next deployment would be Borrego Days, held the following weekend in Borrego Springs, CA.

Organ Donor at YouTopia 2014 Temple

Organ Donor will be in the 2014 YouTopia Temple. YouTopia is the San Diego Burning Man Regional Event, and will be held 16-18 October 2014. Here's the website:

http://sdyoutopia.com