Furby Organ Update! A plan that comes together

At the beginning of today I was having a bit of a meltdown, sat there screwing in all of the potentiometers. Each task taking atleast twice as long as i had initially planned. At about 10 tonight i nearly decided to hand in the towel for the week, i had fried about 10 arduinos in the space of 5 minutes, and bodged a load of wires, setting me back hours. but then BOOM, 6 hours later here i am looking back and the plan is finally starting to take shape!

This evening is the first time i've found my plan actually works! I hardly did any prototyping for this machine, I just kinda made up the plan with some doodles over Christmas. Not really knowing if some of my ideas would actually work..... 

Tonight i'm sitting looking at 9 YES 9 fully functioning Furby voices, singing!

Above in the picture you can see the things i got done today. 

-Finished the midi controller that fits to the front of the organ, its all about aesthetics for me.. haha. so the midi controller needed to look legit. so i took an old organ Key bed, wired it to an Arduino mega, and hey presto it works. (i uploaded the code last night, but it actually works now! so thats attached! none of that multiplexing jiff jaff, each key just wires straight to a pin on the arduino).

-Made the control panel, miles and miles of tangly wire! quite a challenge to keep neat!

-cleaned up the stripboards, lots of mistakes i completely missed before! making some very frustrating issues.

Annoyingly i have had to make a couple of compromises in the design so i can meet my self imposed deadline. These include :-

- Vibrato, i just wont have time to get that whole shabang rolling, so for now, no chance. well maybe not! it might suddenly become an easy prospect.

- The glitch function is a no go. I will have the looping freeze function hooked up! (hopefully! thats the last on the list and requires a whole loada diodes popping on the boards, fingers crossed ill have that done thursday morning before filming it).

But apart from that its going great! i'm going to buy a couple of expression pedals tomorrow to gut and turn into the vowel selection pedal and freezing pedal. and yeah! 

ONE FURBY ORGAN NEARLY COMPLETEEEEE!!!!!