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MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

Building organ consoles for use with Hauptwerk, adding MIDI to existing consoles, obtaining parts, ...
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aboocher

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostWed Dec 12, 2018 11:16 pm

Thanks to everyone for their help - especially to Thomas from organtechnology.com who spent over an hour on the phone with me before I first plugged everything in! Here's a brief summary in case it's useful to anyone

I had forgotten to order the bo16x4 boards to connect the wires from the keyboards. Once those arrived I wired up "one wire per key" into slots 1 - 61 and then did my best to connect the right wires to the hwce2 and keymux boards. What was slightly strange to me was that the power terminal has two separate sides and I think both of them need to be connected to the appropriate parts of the keymux boards. The hardest part for me was what to do with the common wires - i just looped them through the ground and then back to the minus/common on the main board. I was slightly worried I'd fry a circuit, but with Thomas on facetime he gave me the thumbs up to plug it in, and sure enough everything worked (except one note whose wire had pulled out of the board). Hauptwerk was reading everything and it was great! It took me a week or so to connect the pedal board, but now everything is up and running. I don't know if I'll bother setting up the swell pedal I have, as I think it would be a pain trying to mount it, but I wanted to share some embarrassing photos of the finished product.

https://ibb.co/gyMdC6c
https://ibb.co/xztWkQq

Still to do:
- Find a more permanent way to attach the wooden board with the reed switches to the pedalboard. It seems as if the alignments has to be *just right* and I achieved this with lots of duct tape to get everything in place, and even now a few notes get "stuck" sometimes. Does anyone has any advice? The best solution I think would be to mount the board with the switches in a totally adjustable way to that is fixed and then just slide the pedals close to them. I wonder if velcro would be strong enough? At the moment duct table is working well.
- Clean up the wiring so that it's not such a mess
- Find some wood to prop the table up on so the keyboards are closer to the right height.
- Set up the music stand (it has wires coming out of it, but I tried powering it off of the power terminal on the hwce2 and couldn't get anything to work. I might just buy some LED lights and just rig that separately.) Also set it up so that it's actually at eye level, as opposed to leaning slightly against a box fan that's propped against the wall.
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aboocher

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostWed Aug 07, 2019 9:18 pm

Hi everyone,

I'm been having trouble wiring my pistons to my midi-boutique setup. There are 4 pistons (buttons) and strangely 9 wires + a thicker common wires. I've tested resistance between the smaller wires and the common and determined which wire goes with which button. Since I had plenty of empty slots in my bo16x4 that was attached to the pedalboard, I put the 4 thin wires into 4 of the empty slots, and then tried attaching the common wire to the same spot where the pedal board's common wire is (on the attached keymux). But then the buttons wouldn't trigger a midi response. I tried a few different places for the common wire with no luck anywhere. Am I on the right track here? Thanks!

(I think the reason there are 9 wires is because one of the pistons says "stop rail" which presumably has other options, but I don't have that stop rail since i ripped the keyboards out of the original console)
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deebos

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostThu Aug 08, 2019 8:43 am

The midi- hardware offers ( used to ) a small keypad which is useful for diagnostics and also can double as a midi 10 function device. I used mine extensively when building my first organ . I'm in San Diego also..
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larason2

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostThu Aug 08, 2019 4:06 pm

One possibility is that there is a resistor in the switch circuit. When I wired my console, I had to desolder and remove many resistors to get it to work. When you test the resistance, are all the readings you get practically 0 or 1? (0.01 or 0.95), or something more in between? If you are getting any other numbers, there is a resistor, and you will have to disassemble the switches to get it out. Another possibility is that a switch goes to more than one wire. In that case, you will also have to dissassemble the switches and cut the extra wire or contact. I would be suspicious of “common” return rails. Sometimes they are way too big and dissipate the current too much for the circuit board to recognize the switch being activated.
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engrssc

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostThu Aug 08, 2019 5:25 pm

larason2 wrote:I would be suspicious of “common” return rails. Sometimes they are way too big and dissipate the current too much for the circuit board to recognize the switch being activated.


Never heard of that "condition". :?

Rgds,
Ed
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larason2

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Re: MIDI hardware necessary for wiring old Rodgers parts

PostThu Aug 08, 2019 8:35 pm

I’m sure this doesn’t apply for other electronics, but it was my experience with my midi boutique setup that with a lot of circuits connected to a common return rail it didn’t work properly. Perhaps there is a more scientific description of the problem, but I’m not aware of it!
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