Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
rachad47.github.io
Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
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Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#2Very nice way of showing the build progress with the animated gifs.
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#3Pat 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.
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#4Very 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.
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#5Looks very interesting. I see Arduino is used here. Do you feel the latency?
You can have a look at Daisy and Bela as well :)
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#6 "I used to hate electromagnetism"
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#7It’s like the best homemade doorbell ever!
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#8Looks very interesting. I see Arduino is used here. Do you feel the latency? You can have a look at Daisy and Bela as well :)
Daisy and Bela are great for low-latency interactive audio :)
But I think Arduino is a good choice for this.
1. The microcontroller isn't generating audio onboard, it's driving solenoids to hit something. Arduino can do that — the solenoids have travel time but Bela wouldn't solve that.
2. This is more like a sequence playback machine, there's no continuous real-time interactivity. Play/pause is the main interaction and a few ms is ok.
(If you wanted to duet with it latency-free the top of the xylophone is completely exposed so you can just play it normally.)
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#9Very 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.
Re: Auto Xylophone with Homemade Solenoids
#10Very 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.
I had most of my Aliexpress orders arrive in something like 10 days. Is it much slower in the UK?