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Lyrebird Recreation Project

celcius1

Hi Guys,

It's Paul from Paul's Engineering space, and I'm adding another project to the variety I am working on.  As you can tell from the title I am recreating a project from Electronics Australia 1981 October through 1982 January issues.  Alot of this work has involved finding modern equivalents of the chips used in the project, I have been able to either find modern versions, or in the sense of the tone generator, I have recreated it as an oscillator board, as the original chip is no longer made, and the purpose of this project is to recreate it using currently available hardware.

Departing from the original piano's design, I have designed a mainboard, utilising PCI-e connectors, so various parts of the piano can be on daughterboards, I'm only using PCI-e connectors as they are readily available and cheap!  But will also permit changes to design in a way that once I have fully completed the initial project and have defined the projects standard.  The purpose of going down this path, it will give other individuals, the opprtunity to make there own wave shaping boards, and get different sounds out of the piano.

This project has been a huge undertaking and is just as big as my extruder project.

So feel free to discuss with me my efforts so far, I'll have video published once I have finished designing the new mainboard.

Talk Soon

Paul

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  • Hi Paul,

    Just an idea (feel free to ignore), this project is very large and may be hard for many people to dedicate time to.

    How about a cheaper, smaller option too; a couple of octaves max, and just a single board, and just a single-chip 1-2W amplifier or so, and just plain 5V or 12V DC in, let the user figure out what external supply they need. You could still make it adaptable, by using header pins and jumpers, to isolate circuitry (jumpers are low-cost). That way, if a user wished to patch in their own circuit, or replace bits of functionality, they could do it with a plug-on board using those standard 2.54mm pin headers, by simply unplugging the jumpers first. If you don't like the jumpers idea then DIP switches are a possibility but they cost a lot more. Dual-in-line header pins and jumpers could be better as a result.

    Here's an example of what I mean, where in normal use the four jumpers connect the left side to the right side sub-circuits on the same PCB. If a user wishes to patch out, or replace functionality, they can unplug these, and plug on their own board onto the pins (or could use jumper wires, but it would be a lot). It will still be fiddly with jumpers, so it doesn't scale to very large instruments, but perhaps for a couple of octaves, it is manageable (flat flex could be used for the areas of the design where lots of parallel connections are required, or even a small PCB with a dual-in-line socket that is effectively shorted on that PCB. so all the connections can be made at once).

    image

    This will also allow people to test your implementation at a lower cost, before building a full-size version. 

    Also, unlike the separation of functionality that the original project had, it could be good to add a lot more jumpers at every sub-circuit, so that users can test and insert and modify a whole lot more than with the original. I think a single-board compact version would be very attractive.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Also, I've not checked the wave shaping functionality, but you mention limiting it; probably that's the part of the design that you really don't want to limit if you can, and perhaps a smaller version of the project would have less complication for keeping more of the wave shaping features intact.

  • in reply to shabaz

    What I meant by that, on the old project part of the wave shaping was actually on the boards that had the keys connected to it, I shifted all that circuitry to the wave shaping board, to free up expansion of the keyboards ability, also the keys are velocity sensitive as well.

    Even though I posted about it now I have been working on this for the last 2 months.

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  • in reply to shabaz

    What I meant by that, on the old project part of the wave shaping was actually on the boards that had the keys connected to it, I shifted all that circuitry to the wave shaping board, to free up expansion of the keyboards ability, also the keys are velocity sensitive as well.

    Even though I posted about it now I have been working on this for the last 2 months.

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