(^26) The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book raspberrypi.org/magpi
SELF-PLAYING
PIPE ORGAN
xperienced woodworker
Wendell Kapustiak needed
all his carpentry skills to
create this impressive self-playing
pipe organ (magpi.cc/2fMacLy).
“The most fundamental [problem]
was that I had no idea how a
pipe organ actually worked,”
admits Wendell, who eventually
based its mechanical workings
on a project by Matthias Wandel
(woodgears.ca,. The most diL·cult
part was making the 42 wooden
Projects SHOWCASE
This handcrafted wooden instrument can play any MIDI tune
Wendell first
tried making
a MIDI wine
glass player
The organ took
about three
years to build
He bought the
blower on eBay
for $80
Pipes range
from 9 to 40
inches in length
He’s now
rebuilding
the organ in
solid oak
Quick
Facts
E
WENDELL KAPUSTIAK
A retired investment banker from
Venice, Florida, Wendell is an
experienced woodworker. He uses a
Raspberry Pi to log weather station
data and monitor his electricity usage.
wakrec.blogspot.co.uk
pipes, which span three-and-
half octaves, since each one has
unique dimensions to produce the
correct pitch. For this, Wendell
used information provided by
Raphi Giangiulio’s YouTube videos
(youtu.be/-mibK_Dp-ZY).
The pipes are linked via PVC
plumbing to a wind chest powered
by a Kooltronic KBR125 blower,
as used in data centres. “I had
originally tried a small shop vac as
a blower,” Wendell tells us. “It had
two problems. The first was that it
was very noisy; the second was that
it ran hot. When I enclosed it in a
box to control the noise, it got so
hot that my first one burned out.Ĥ
To make it play, each wooden
pipe has a valve opened and
closed by a solenoid, triggered
from an Arduino Due via a power-
boosting driver board. The ‘brains’
of the operation is a Raspberry
Pi, which performs three main
functions. As well as a graphical
Each of 42 handcrafted
wooden pipes produces
a different musical note
When triggered, solenoids
open their respective pipe
valves to play notes
The solenoids are wired
indirectly to an Arduino Due
receiving data from a Pi