Here I will document my current project, construction of a 32-note pedalboard for use with digital pipe organ.  Several of my musical instrument designs are intended to, someday, be produced and sold on a small scale, but this is not one of those.  I simply need a pedalboard for my own musical efforts -- and I don't want to pay a lot for it!  So this project is all about how to get something which functions adequately, at the lowest possible cost for materials, and with a minimum of fancy tools.  My one big tool investment has been a drill press; everything else is done with hand tools and a portable jigsaw.

Here is what it's looking like so far.  This gives an idea of the final layout and size (pretty big and ungainly, but I've designed it to fold in half, which will help some, and I may even make the two halves completely separable, so that I can travel with just the lower 17 notes when I don't need the full range).  However, it all needs to be ripped apart again, because the glue joints on the pivot rail did not work out: wood too dense, not enough glue penetration (even with holes which I drilled, anticipating this possible problem).  No harm done, just thought I'd try it with some wood that I had on-hand.  Now I need to obtain some softer lumber.

The keylevers are one of my serendipitous finds from Home Depot, pre-finished 8-foot 1x3s for slightly over $1 each.  I will probably end up re-finishing these levers differently, resulting in extra work to strip the existing finish (at least on the tops of the sharps), but still, the smoothness and accuracy of the shape of the boards was much better than the typical unfinished 1x3s in a similar price range.

The electronic part of this pedalboard will be extremely simple: the 32 switches (I'm using keyswitches cannibalized from an old computer keyboard) are just wired in a matrix with a diode-per-switch, and the rows and columns are brought out to a D-25 connector.  All the active electronics are housed in a different unit, which I've already built and which I use to connect my manual keyboards, wired the same way.  Currently, my interface circuit converts from these D-25 inputs, to a PC parallel port; but this is getting more and more inconvenient as no modern PCs have parallel ports any more, so I'm investigating various ways to switch over to USB instead.  One "obvious" solution are these parallel port to USB converter dongles, but given the non-standard way that I use the parallel port lines, I have not succeeded yet in getting the system to work with any of these.  A possibly better alternative would be to use a microcontroller such as Atmel AVR, and the FTDI FT232R chip, available mounted on a board for like $15.  In any case, once the switch-closure information is transferred to the PC "somehow", I have written a C program which converts that to a MIDI data stream, which can be used by software synths such as Fluidsynth.  (This is all running under Linux.)  I call my keyboard interface circuit and program, collectively, "solder2midi"; I've written about it sporadically over the past couple years, over at satanbane.xanga.com.