Calliope Stuff

Have been working on various projects evenings, as it’s been too damn hot during the day. Here are a few photos of that mess on the electronics workbench. Happy to say Calliope has made it out of the machine shop hopefully for the last time, so everything else should be software and electronic-related stuff that happens in the ‘dog free’ room, heh.

Here’s a shot of the circuit board that I built to allow my laptop to “talk” to the calliope’s solenoid valves. The widget in the foreground is the BS-II Basic Stamp from Parallax.com

Photo #1: circuit board

Here’s another shot of the circuit board. Kinda messy, yes? The big aluminum piece is covering the transformer that’s converting 110vAC (used to run Stamp’s ‘wall wart’) to 24vDC to run the solenoid valves. I couldn’t find a ‘kit box’ big enough, so I’ve still got to make sides for the enclosure. Two switches, one for each voltage, seemed the right way to lay it out. Distribution of power to various bits was made simpler thanks to a power bus (the brass-and-black thing) available from Napa Auto Parts

Photo #2: wiring

And finally here’s a shot of the 12 whistle ‘octave’ (including the black keys, so to speak), nested now between two rows of 6 solenoid valves. This arrangement was a little more compact than discrete components, but it’s getting heavy. Definitely a two-guy job to get it up and down the stairs now. Note threaded whistle caps: these have been remade long enough to allow whistle tuning over a fairly large range. I’ve found that very small atmospheric changes can throw whistles off-key. If there isn’t sufficient provision for adjustment they can be un-tunable.

Photo #3: Octave