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I had most of my Aliexpress orders arrive in something like 10 days. Is it much slower in the UK?
That's almost 2 weeks! Amazon Prime comes the next day.
I'm used to my online purchases taking time. The closest thing we have to Amazon is Ozon, it's 1-2 days if you buy something that's already in a warehouse in your city (i.e. if you're lucky) and several more days if it's not.
Pat Metheny made an album called Orchestrion using an entire orchestra/band of real instruments played by solenoids over MIDI. Great music. (If you like Pat Metheny.) It was an insane project. He even took it on tour. The actual build was by Eric Singer and his team. https://www.wired.com/2010/01/orchestrion/
Pretty cool! FWIW, this is a glockenspiel or bells ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel ), not a xylophone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylophone ).
But the best thing about this story is the video "Without the Xylophone" - a terrifying robotic bed of nails.
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Personally I avoid buying direct from China whenever possible because I want parts quickly so that I can make progress on the project. The cheapest solenoids I can see on Amazon Prime are about £5 each. 24 of those would be over £100. Plus, the stated goal of the project is to learn a bit more about electromagnetism, so making your own solenoids is not even a bad idea.
I had most of my Aliexpress orders arrive in something like 10 days. Is it much slower in the UK?
Very cool project! But I would dispute this: > buying 24 Solenoids is quite expensive They're about $1-2 apiece on Aliexpress; I doubt making your own can cost much less? In my experience, making one solenoid is fun just to see how it works (and how simple it is, really); but making more than one is a little painful and not fun.
Personally I avoid buying direct from China whenever possible because I want parts quickly so that I can make progress on the project. The cheapest solenoids I can see on Amazon Prime are about £5 each. 24 of those would be over £100. Plus, the stated goal of the project is to learn a bit more about electromagnetism, so making your own solenoids is not even a bad idea.
You can learn by making one. Making 24 is super annoying IMHO.
(Also, if you want to try, ready-made sewing machine bobbins are a good alternative to 3D-printing your own solenoid body.)
And about the rest of your comment: one approach would be to buy one solenoid from Amazon, to let you do experiments and set up the whole machine, while waiting for the rest of the goods to arrive from China.
I have a full octave of organ pipes, and I've always dreamed of making an instrument out of it. I've just never figured out how to make the electrically-actuated valves.
As for electronic control, it shouldn't be too hard - perhaps you already know the following, but I'll write it here in case it's useful. You'll need as many electromagnetic solenoids as you have pipes. First you need to construct a 'wind chest', which is a shallow, air-tight box that can be made of any material. A plastic storage tub should do fine. Then you punch a hole in the top of the wind chest for each pipe, and make some sort of grommet to hold the pipes in place in the holes; this would be a 'toe board' on a real pipe organ. Mount the solenoids directly under the holes, and attach something soft to squish up against the pipe and stop the airflow. You of course need to have a blower that can pressurise the wind chest.
No guarantees about how that's going to sound! :) If you wanted to construct something really high-quality, you could follow Raphi Giangiulio, who has documented every stage of his fully-mechanical tracker organ: http://www.rwgiangiulio.com/index.htm
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why would you buy solenoids from amazon instead of an actual electronics distributor?
I pretty much always buy components from either Amazon or eBay. Is that unusual? I just looked on Farnell and the cheapest solenoids that I could find in stock have a weird housing (and they're £6.38 each which is already more than Amazon), the cheapest sensible ones that are in stock are £12 each, which is way more expensive than Amazon, plus you have to pay VAT and postage on top, plus you have to faff around with…
Because of reliability, etc.
For the same reason you wouldn't order your ingredients for a professional Michelin starred restaurant from Amazon.
I've almost never found Amazon cheaper either. The sellers on Amazon are almost always not the original manufacturer, they're usually FOB folks who are just buying big boxes of things and then selling them individually.
You're almost always better served to swim upstream and get things from the manufacturer, or from reputable electronics distributors like digikey, Farnell, mouser, jameco,etc. A quick search at some of those and I'm finding suitable solenoids at $2-5