Toe Stud Module

"An engineer can do for a dime what anyone else can do for a dollar" - Anonymous


The board which holds the toestuds comes out as a single module, now that I've removed the extraneous wiring.

As shown here, the Crescendo is on the right and the swell on the left.  However with a 3 manual instrument, you want two boxes.  As the Crescendo doesn't work very well on Hauptwerk, and in the world of infinite memories, it seems a crutch, I'm using these two shoes for Swell and Choir.  Of course, the positioning is vital, so I created a dummy shoe at the right height as the Crescendo shoe.

Workarounds

The scanner I'm using takes 32 inputs (4 groups of 8) and 3 analog shoe inputs.  The mechanisms on these shoes are essentially a set of contacts engaged by a ground plate.

So I've worked around it by building a microcontroller which scans the inputs from the shoe mechanism, then outputs a PWM to create an analog voltage (which goes into a scanner which then converts it back to a digital signal).

Seems convoluted, but it preserves the simpler interface of a single MIDI combiner.  It also leaves all 32 inputs open for pistons.  I have 8 from the manual (see previous post), and 15 from the toe studs.  A side benefit is that because I'm filtering the output of the PWM, there is some inertia in the interface, which better emulates the real action of a shutter mechanism.

The previous picture shows the old crescendo mechanism, now the swell shoe.  The old swell mechanism, now the choir shoe, is connected to the digital to analog microcontroller blob attached to the board. I picked off 8 inputs from the crescendo mechanism (swell shoe), and 8 from the swell mechanism (choir shoe). You can also see the "crescendo" dummy shoe in place.

So the result is as follows

Labels are coming. Now the only module to do us the stops, and I'm waiting a couple of weeks for the new USB versions.