This weekend has been given over to wiring up the pedalboard and expression shoes. It should also have been given over to cutting the grass, but that wasn’t nearly as interesting although it may have proved less frustrating.
The first vexation came when I connected the pedal MIDI nerve to the MIDI central nervous system and plugged that into the laptop to sniff the MIDI messages. The first seven pedals were fine, but the eighth was silent. The next seven were also fine, and the eighth was silent. This pattern was repeated a third time, and then the last eight notes were completely mute. Nary a message issued forth. This was the cue for much poking and prodding with a multimeter, discussions with people who are more knowledgable than I about such matters, an email to Roman at midi-hardware.com, and much stomping around in a foul temper by me. Roman replied with an obvious question: was the PDS module correctly seated on the header pins of the REED32 module? ‘What?’ I asked myself. ‘What a ridiculous question. Of course it is. I’m not stupid.’ Still wearing my stompy boots, off I went to check again before penning a scornful reply.
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The PDS module was not correctly seated: in fact it was out by a pin. Correcting this embarrassing error proved that the pedals were, in fact, all working perfectly. Somewhat chastened, I spent about half an hour crawling around on the floor with a hot soldering iron in one hand, wiring the pots up to the cable. That was fun. Then back to testing, to discover that, while the first and third (swell and solo) shoes work perfectly, the middle (choir) shoe is generating spurious messages on average once every fifteen seconds. I think that this is down to interference, and I have to try and wrap some additional earth wires around the bare wiper wires tomorrow, which will hopefully solve the problem. If it doesn’t, it has been suggested to me by a beermat that some cat 5 network cable would be even better and have superior shielding ability over such a short (1 metre) run of cable. That’s plan B.
Today’s photographs are the fully wired expression shoes from behind, and the organ console with the pedalboard attached, possibly for the first time in several years. Dewi thought I was photographing him, and wouldn’t stay out of the way.
Once the problem of the interference is solved, I’m somewhat at a loss to proceed further, until I get some hardwood to fill in the gaps on either side of the keyboard, or the toe pistons – both of which David is currently working on.
I may have to cut the grass after all.