This post is long overdue, but I wanted to be at point where I could end on a positive note. Were Hercules to sin against Apollo today, he might be sentenced to solder, unsolder, and resolder some fiddly little terminals until, blinded by his tears, he burns his thumb.

I once had a plan. A beautiful plan, that made one weep to gaze upon. Well, hubris will always receive its payment. My plan is in ashes. It has been torn to pieces, buried in Soft Pete for three months, and recycled as firelighters. The amount of interference experienced by the switches was simply impossible to manage. The problem originally looked exactly like hysteresis, and I spent many fruitless hours trying to fix something that was not broken. In the end, after much advice from several very clever people, I was able to establish that “there’s no such thing as a common ground in an installation as big as an organ console”.

Cue a mass-desoldering of all the signalling wire from the stops, the removal of the hand-made connection boards I was so proud of, and a re-wire using twisted pair, with each ground going right back to the MIDI module and terminating right next to it. This has resulted in perfectly well-behaved drawstops on the right-hand stop jamb. This has taken me altogether too long to accomplish, and has been a remarkably stressful experience. I am a wiser man. Also, sadder.

I have also taken this opportunity to replace the old (and very noisy) pots on this jamb, and replace them with nice new ones. These are less noisy, and after proper configuration of the pot MIDI module, they are behaving exactly as they should.

On the plus side, David has examined my soldering and pronounced it “improved”. So there is that.