New Hauptwerk Console finally complete ...

I am really pleased to say that my new Hauptwerk Console (dubbed OPUS II) is now complete, after three years and two months of work, designing & building it. It is still currently running under version 4.2.1.003, as I did not want to be building a new console and changing the configuration to suit a new version of the Hauptwerk software at the same time, but it will shortly be upgraded to version 6.

I think that it will be of interest to other Hauptwerk users, because it has two or three features that are still fairly rare in self-built organs, namely automatic electronic stop labels, and a central control console facility for the control of many Hauptwerk functions.

I have prepared a comprehensive Video Tour of the instrument, which is in two parts. They are:

PART I: [url]https://youtu.be/7vGIMomsehs[/url] explains the general features of the instrument.
PART II: [url]https://youtu.be/ENOmvTRibis[/url] begins with a montage showing the stages in the building process, and then provides an account of the various sections of the instrument, including their design and working.

I hope that these videos will be of interest, and possibly provide some ideas for those building, or about to build, a comprehensive Hauptwerk Virtual Pipe Organ!

Best wishes,

Kenneth Spencer

[M. Qualley]

Congratulations Kenneth!

And thank you for moving to V6.

Best,
Michelle

Hi Kenneth

Having just watched your first video I have to congratulate you on a truly beautiful achievement!
Not only is the technology extremely impressive, but you have managed to complement it perfectly with the aesthetics – no mean task!

Graham

Thank you Michelle, and Graham for those nice comments!
It has been a long development and it is good to be able to say that it is now complete!

Best wishes,

Kenneth Spencer

Kenneth,
This looks very good and well thought through for playing. It was obviously a huge amount of work. Congratulations.

Would I be correct in understanding that you used HW's LCD support for the "dynamic" stop labels? Did you use any encoding to handle "special characters" from non English languages (such as ö and é)?

Great job. Enjoy playing!

Iain

Congratulations on your system! It's lovely, and very cleverly put together. I particularly like the baroque key coverings. I wish you many happy hours playing it.

Thanks, both Iain and Larason for those nice remarks!

Iain: Yes, I have used the LCD text support system. As I mewntioned in one of the videos, it is quite tedious typing it all in, but it does work. It would be excellent if a little code could be added to HW to transfer the stop text from the XML files into the text slots in the LCD Text dialogues!
As you will have seen, to save space, I use one OLED display per two stops. The code to manage this across two stop jambs, each with their own microcontroller took a long time to get right. During design and prototyping, I had one OLED per stop, and the OLEDs could update in real time as you edited - excellent for formatting test into two lines - real-time text display is difficult with the two-per-line arrangement, so you can hit "File -> Save settings" to update the label texts so far entered.
I haven't yet entered any non-English alphabetical letters, so I am not quite sure about the answer to your question on that. I will test it & let you know. I believe that the font-typeface which I have used includes a wide range, so the answer is probably yes, but I'll try it sometime!

Thanks again, and best wishes.

Ken

Hi Ken,

I think the issue is that the LCD text has to be seven bit ASCII (which does not include non English (well American really) characters. It does however have non printable control codes such as ESC which you could, with software in the decoder, interpret as "special" characters for display. Entering them in HW may be more challenging.

You could use HW's console status system or indeed one of the LCD messages (loading...) to detect the organ being loaded and use a file outside HW (through the decoder?) to set the stop labels. It would be easier to prepare this than typing in many HW LCD text strings!

Just a though.

Iain

Hi Iain

For my OLED installation I have adopted an approach similar to what you suggest:
All of the stop-lists for my various organs are incorporated into the Arduino sketch (program) – something that can be done fairly comfortably seated in front of my desk-top computer.

In Hauptwerk>Organ settings>Advanced MIDI applications>Custom MIDI configuration messages to send, an unique four bit SYSEX message is entered for each organ. (This is tedious enough to do, seated awkwardly at the organ bench!)
This message, which is sent whenever a fresh organ is loaded, tells the Arduino which of the stop-lists to display.

I haven’t dared ask the friend who helped me with the Arduino programming to look into displaying non-English characters that are not included in the font!

Regards
Graham

Thanks, Iain and Graham ...

... I was about to reply to Iain, saying that there was a chap with who had corresponded with me about various aspects of developing stop labelling systems, and about using the C Language with Arduinos. That chap was Graham Harrison, and hey presto, he has answered for himself! I am fortunate having written many business applications in the C language since 1986, and having had my own software business for 19 years (now retired, however).

Yes, it is somewhat tedious to type into the HW dialogues: many of which are not designed for minimum mouse movement, and could stand alot of ergonomic improvement. However, my HW PC (an ultra-compact Intel NUC) is very very easy to remove from the organ, and I just take it up to my office to type the text into the HW dialogues! I have over 40 organs all fully configured for the new console.

My software was at an advanced stage when Graham contacted me and told me that his label text is stored within his program source/executable. I preferred to use the HW inbuilt methodology, partly because I also intend at some point to release the software pre-installed in Arduino Dues, with clear instructions on using the HW dialogues and with a design and specifications for stripboards and other hardware for support of the OLED arrays, for those who might like to construct their own but don't have programming expertise to edit the source and recompile it without error. If the Due had an EEPROM or reliable and permanent Flash Memory for label text storage in an external file there I might have chosen differently. I was told that the Due's Flash memory is cleared in some circumstances, so I rejected label text storage outwith the executable but on the Due.

Iain: Regarding labels in other language fonts/text - the Hauptwerk stop text dialogues will happily tolerate 8-bit text, as will the OLEDs being bit-mapped, unlike the usual LCDs. The graphics libraries I use can display 8-bit text, but I am using a 7-bit font at the moment: JuraLight8pt7b for stop text (allows 4 lines), and JuraLight11pt7b (allows three lines) for Organ and Divisional information. I am told that this font will soon be extended to 8-bit, which would solve any foreign character problem. I do use a couple of non-alphanumeric ASCII characters to indicate end-of-line (because I wanted my newlines to be independent of the HW Line1 & Line2) and end-of-label (because I have two labels per OLED).

Thanks both, for your kind interest keep safe & well!

Best wishes,

Ken.

Ken. The 6.01 User Guide LCD midi specification says that the characters are seven bit, though I’ve not checked what is transmitted. Iain.

Thanks Iain ...

... that's interesting, because just before I sent my earlier reply, I created a stop test message with some 8 bit characters, and they weren't rejected. But as it was on my office PC, and my organ is still down in my garage (my wife is decorating my music room in antipation of us bringing it up here) I couldn't examine what was transmitted.

But if I have time tomorrow, I will connect a Due to my office PC (it has HW installed) and enter an 8-bit character into HW and see what comes out of the Due. As I understand it, LCDs are restricted to 7-bit with a restricted matrix, but as OLEDs are bit-mapped it is dependent on the driver as to whether it will work with 7bit or 8bit, or both, fonts. There again, if I type an 8bit character and it displays, but when it is transmitted, HW sends it in 7bits, it won't matter whether my chosen font is available in 8bits anyway! But it'll be interesting to see.

Bye for now!

Ken

Good morning, Iain and Graham ...

... This morning I connected up an Auduino Due to my office PC, and installed the current version of my kasLABS software, in order to investigate HW's behaviour with stop labelling text. Here is a summary:

The I opened HW (v4.2.1.003 still), the St. Anne's organ, and opened its MIDI LCD control panel.
I edited the text for the Left Jamb from "Oboe 8'" to "Oboe é 8'" ([Alt] + 130).
I edited the text for the Left Jamb from "Tremulant" to "ç Tremulant" ([Alt] + 135).

Hauptwerk displayed, accepted, saved and retrieved the correct amended textual data. At first, I thought it also seemed to output the 8-bit data. I say "seemed" because I could only test it in the Arduino Serial Monitor output which is also 7-bit only. The unprintable characters were replaced by a question mark (?) in the output text. I didn't know whether that was HW or the Arduino Serial Monitor ignoring the 8-bit character. However, I could find no evidence of any 8-bit character code being output in HW's MIDI data stream.

I originally considered that HW would accept 8-bit characters BUT that the language of the User Guide was unclear in that it is the LCD technology which is limited to 7-bit not all display technologies, not the HW LCD Text interface. I think it is a pity that HW accepts and saves 8-bit characters, but seems not to output them, and no doubt Martin can confirm that to be so. In any case, organ building and stop nomenclature is a thoroughly International multi-lingual business, and given that fact,I would prefer not to see the 7-bit restriction across all display technnologies.

I haven't typed these 8-bit characters into my organ console because I know that I am using 7-bit text fonts. At some point, however 8-bit fonts will be available. So the answer to your original question, Iain is that at the moment, in the English language fonts, the 7-bit restriction means that my OLED based stop jambs cannot directly display foreign accented textual characters, even if HW were to transmit them. But even with 7-bit MIDI text transfer in HW, there would still be some 17 or so 7-bit display characters that are never used in stop label contexts, and my code could easily be extended to translate them for 8-bit display. Graham will have great difficulty devising a way doing the same thing because the Arduino IDE editor is based also on 7-bit fonts, and he would not be able to type them directly into his code anyway.

OK - this post is much too long so I'll stop now!

Veery best wishes,

Ken

[mdyde]

Hello Ken,

We do have an enhancement request logged for extending Hauptwerk's LCD system to handle non-7-bit characters (e.g. UTF-8, since simply using a fixed 8-bit character set would only partly help, e.g. with Western European characters). That would of course potentially involve Hauptwerk-compatible LCD/label-display hardware makers also adding support for it.

I'll add a note to that enhancement request that you'd appreciate that for your electronic labelling system too.

Thanks, Martin - that's very helpful.

Incidentally, I have corrected a small but significant error in my last post, when I typed 8-bit rather than 7-bit.

Thanks, and best wishes,

Ken