Load-in at theNAT

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

Organ Donor at San Diego Maker Faire 2016

The experience at San Diego Maker Faire 2016 was outstanding in every way. Held at Balboa Park on 1-2 October 2016, Organ Donor Opus 1 was deployed int the Natural History Museum, aka theNAT.

Setup was Friday evening and went as flawlessly as it ever has. The new software that allows for much easier matching of note to valve offered the only real glitch. After three of the hundred twenty two pipes were taught, the cursor started moving all on its own all across the touchscreen. This made it impossible to assign the right pipe to the right valve.

After making sure the wireless mouse was off, the touchscreen connector was re-seated. The problem re-appeared after about twenty pipes. After pondering how what we were seeing could possibly happen, we remembered that the pitch wheels were programmed as cursor movers. The pitch wheels were slightly nudged just enough to key up the on-screen cursors. After the wheels were turned to a neutral location, the problem went away.

We arrived on Saturday and put in 8 hours of hosting. We met a large number of enthusiastic attendees and had so many wonderful conversations! Several important contacts were made, and we were visited by Maker Faire staff to check in at least twice.

Small children generally thin out in the afternoon. This means less banging on the keyboard and more accomplished playing. The only time we stop people from banging on the keyboard is if it's endangering the keyboards. People generally never get to touch a pipe organ. They're always off limits and set off in their own space, or hidden behind walls. Getting to create sound out of acoustic pipes, even if it's a bit dissonant, is a special experience that can spark an entire career. Our goal is to demystify the pipe organ, show what's always hidden away behind walls, explain how they work, and most importantly - let people play.

On Sunday, several extremely accomplished players graced our exhibit, and garnered extended and loud applause. I got a chance to walk around the faire and talk to other exhibitors and enjoy the atmosphere. The amateur radio exhibits were great and the food truck lines were slow.

The most time that Organ Donor wasn't being played was perhaps 45 seconds over the two days.

Late Sunday afternoon, we were visited by Rob Burkhead, our event coordinator, who awarded us the Maker Merit blue ribbon! He passed along extremely high praise for our exhibit, efforts, attitude, and effect. Sol Diego and all San Diego burners should be proud. Without your support and encouragement, Organ Donor wouldn't be at the Faire.

Several other large Faire exhibits were from the burner community, and several booths were staffed by burners. Burners volunteered to help run the event, and lots of burners attended.

If you want a wonderful experience where you can share your art directly with appreciative, inquisitive, positive, and interesting people, then give exhibiting at Maker Faire a chance. Non-commercial booths are free. The process is easy. The hardest part is figuring out parking and setup.

Tear-down was easy and Faire and museum staff were entirely supportive and helpful. I can't say enough good things about how the Natural History Museum helps exhibitors. They know it is a big effort to get your art or exhibit set up. They help you solve problems, get things done, and make you feel appreciated. Plus, you're hanging in the same room with a big old dinosaur skeleton.

The organization that puts Maker Faire on is called San Diego Makers Guild. They are in need of volunteers for planning, organizing, recruiting, volunteering, and staffing. Join up at http://www.sdmakersguild.org

There is tremendous continuing potential for rich and varied representation of all San Diego Burners at Maker Faire (as well as STEAM Maker Faire, San Diego County Fair, and many other events up and down the calendar). Performance art, music, LED arts and crafts, fashion, engineering, structural exhibits, fire art, art cars, engineering tricks, magic, improv - it's all welcome.

We are very much looking forward to coming back to Maker Faire with Organ Donor Opus 2!

Rotary Switch Failure

We probably should have anticipated that putting a huge knob on the rotary switch would increase the mechanical stresses on the switch. The switch held up to a few hours of vigorous use by the many children at STEAM Maker Festival, and then started showing signs of failure. At one point I caught it acting as an 11-position rotary switch, instead of the 10-position switch it is supposed to be. The detents still lined up with the panel markings, but some (!) of the functions were offset by one position. Then, the end stop stopped working, leaving the knob free to go all the way around in one direction but not the other. Finally, the switch stopped working entirely, making no connection at any position.

We had to alter the software to ignore the rotary switch and stay in one mode (the keyboard visualization with waterfall effect) for the rest of the event.

Back in the lab, I pulled out the rotary switch for failure analysis. I found two problems, explaining the observed symptoms. The end stop relies on a round sheet metal plate with a tab bent down. That plate was bent, leaving the tab at an angle, so it could ride up over the stop in one direction but not the other. It's easy to see how the plate could get bent when the knob is slammed against the stop.  The other problem was that the moving contact that wipes over the ten fixed contacts was broken off. I found the contact loose in the housing.

I speculate that the stop plate bent first. The wiper contact then fell off the end of the fixed contacts into the gap between the first and tenth contact. When the knob was returned to a normal position, the wiper contact had to ride up onto the first or tenth fixed contact, which it was not designed to do. It was able to survive a few such transitions before breaking off.

So, we need to find a more robust rotary switch or else go back to a much smaller knob.

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 ready to pack up for STEAM Maker Festival

Organ Donor Opus 1 will be exhibited at STEAM Maker Festival at the Del Mar Fairgrounds on Saturday, December 5, 2015. On Thursday night, all the parts are staged to be packed into two vehicles for transport to the fairgrounds and assembly on Friday afternoon. Here's what that looks like.

New knob for the Organelle

The knob we were able to find commercially was just too small and plain, so we designed and 3D-printed a much bolder knob.

The knob design is published on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1160160

Before the upgrade:

After the upgrade:

Obviously we need to redesign and reprint the panel markings to accommodate this much larger knob.

The knob was designed using OnShape.com, a new (still in beta) parametric 3D CAD system that's free to use with almost no restrictions. Worth checking out.

Organ Donor Richard scores equipment for project!

Thanks to Organ Donor Richard, we now have a spiffy kiosk for future work!

Check out this pdf of the product:

http://a1920.g.akamai.net/f/1920/1078/8h/www.imimages.com/visitor/3m/ChassisTouch.pdf

Richard spotted it on Craigslist, and we earned one of the two kiosks based on the impression given by our website. :+)

Can't wait to fill it with fun interactive features!

Organ Donor is currently showing at Maker Faire at Balboa Park 10am-6pm October 3-4. 

http://sdmakerfaire.org

Come see us and dozens of other amazing and inspirational projects! 

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 Project Overview

Organ Donor Goes to the Fair and Finds it's Fantastic

The San Diego County Fair runs from 5 June – 5 July 2015, and is expected to draw nearly a million and a half visitors. Like Burning Man, the fair represents drastically different things to different people. Unlike Burning Man, it’s very commercial, very spectator-friendly, and while it may flirt with a PG rating, it’s almost entirely kid-friendly and carefully curated.

However, there are some surprising commonalities between Burning Man and The Fair. There are some excellent untapped opportunities for Burners to participate in The Fair, greatly increase our presence in the wider community, and substantially improve our art projects along the way.

The fair is a fabric that supports diverse experience. The rides are provided for people to play on. The music is performed for people to enjoy. The demonstration gardens are planted for people to browse. The food is plentiful for people to buy. The contests are organized for people to compete.

You can spend the entire day studying woodworking, gems, art, photography, yearbooks, and school projects. There are workshops and demonstrations in all of these areas. Or, you can spend the entire day riding carnival rides and eating. These two paths would only cross at the bathroom.

The Fair aims to submerse you in whatever captures your attention. The Fair wants to subvert you from a spectator to an active and engaged participant. Preferably leading with your wallet, of course, but not necessarily. Organ Donor has found that The Fair really, really, really wants exhibitors, not just more customers. This is a huge opportunity for Sol Diego, and therefore all San Diego Burners.

Burning Man art projects are an excellent fit for The Fair. The Fair has facilities large enough to show off the biggest art cars. There is a car show at the Fair every year, right at the entrance, with fleets of cars that rotate daily through all sorts of car clubs. Why not a burner art car day at The Fair?

The Creative Youth Tent in the midfield is an enormous space. This year, 15,000 pieces of art will be displayed. These are pieces made by children. This is where Organ Donor will be playable from 5 June – 5 July. Imagine more interactive indoor style Burner exhibits in this space!

There are huge swathes of open space that could very well host large constructed projects, LED-art, fire art, or whatever we came up with. Performance pieces, games, puzzles, the list is literally endless. Any ideas that are “too late, too big, too hard” for 2015 Burning Man Midway could find an almost perfect fit in a real Midway at The Fair.

Participation in The Fair requires completion and installation months ahead of the typical Burner build rush in July and August. This requires a team to have their act together, logistics-wise, much earlier in the year. The benefits, however, are substantial.

First, the potential for publicity and recruiting is enormous. Imagine demonstrating a working project and being able to invite people to join Sol Diego.

Second, the ability to test-drive a new interactive art project with real people over a long period of time will provide the sort of feedback that you don’t want to wait for the playa to get. Imagine being able to include a fantastic new feature or shape or structure that simply wouldn’t have occurred to you otherwise, without people actually encountering your artwork in the wild. Since The Fair closes after the 4^th of July, you would have July and August to upgrade or modify your project to make it substantially better for the Burn.

The schedule does have a downside. I mentioned already that Organ Donor wasn’t able to come to Figment this year because of the conflict between The Fair and Figment. While we might have been able to take Organ Donor down and moved to Figment, the odds of being able to easily get back in to The Fair to set back up were very long. They want exhibits to be completely ready to go, and stay as long as possible. Setting up Organ Donor is a long and messy process, so we chose to stay for the entire length of The Fair. This doesn’t have to be the case for a project that is smaller or easier to set up.

Brandie envisioned Sol Diego becoming something like the Flaming Lotus Girls, with their projects being installed as large, recognized, funded, public art works in and around the city of San Francisco. I don’t have any insight or connections with the city of San Diego, outside of the ones I have accidentally made from time to time, but my feeling is that we should probably follow the path of least resistance and go where we are wanted, first.

If, as Brandie described, the San Diego city public art people are hostile to burners or have already decided we’re just a bunch of flakes, or honestly think that community driven art is fundamentally lesser quality than their sculptures of awkwardly posed surfers, then so be it. We have paths available to us that lead not only to the playa, but also to the fairgrounds, Balboa Park, and friendly museum spaces. Following these paths and showing that we are not flakes and that our art is not of lesser quality, while having a total blast and making people happy, sounds like having our cake and eating it too.

What’s required to do this successfully? Planning. Financial support. Communications. Following through. Starting now to draw up ideas and fundraising for the efforts. It means we stop waiting for Burning Man org to get around to eventually telling us what they think we should do, and start picking our projects for ourselves, showing them to San Diego, and then taking them to The Burn.

Looking forward to 2016, I’d like to know how interested we are in recruiting, sponsoring, building, showing, and supporting burner art in community spaces like The Fair and Balboa Park?

Organ Donor at the San Diego County Fair 5 June - 5 July 2015

What is a chord?

We've been working hard on the math that is underneath the surface of Organ Donor behavior. We're now beginning to grapple with pitches, or notes, instead of just pitch classes. A pitch class in western classical music is the name of one of the 12 semitones on the scale (C, F, G, etc).

A pitch also includes the octave or register (C4, F6, G2, etc)

So, up until now we've been working with 12-element vectors, where each position stands for a pitch class. A triad would be something like this:

[1,0,0,0,1,0,0,1,0,0,0,0]

The 1's indicate the presence of a note at that semitone. There are 12 semitones, and three of them are played.

But this doesn't tell you which octave the pitches are in.

With a small change, this information can be recorded in the vector.

[1,0,0,0,2,0,0,3,0,0,0,0]

Here, the first note of the triad (at semitone position 0) is in the first octave. The second note of the triad (at semitone position 4) is in the second octave. The third note of the triad (at semitone position 7) is in the third octave. 

Now, when handling this vector, I can make a list of which octaves the pitches are in. When I rearrange or invert the chord, I can make sure that the octave information survives. 

Some transformations we don't yet have a method for preserving the information. For example, when getting the prime form of a chord, we are really calculating what class the chord falls into. The registration of the notes in the chords doesn't matter because prime form encompasses many variations of registration. Going from prime form to vectors means that when you generate the vectors, you are generating lists of pitch-class representations (the vector has all 1's), but not pitch representations (the vector has many numbers).

Something that occurred to us is that using 1's for generic presence of a pitch class gets confusing if you also take 1 to mean that it's from the lowest octave. This will be fixed, but we're not yet sure what the very best and most clever way forward is!

-Abraxas3d

Organ Donor Opus 2 Bottle Tracker Spreadsheet

How many and what type? Here's the stats!

Organ Donor Opus 2 Bottle Tracker Spreadsheet

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.