At 08:26 02/26/99 +1000, Paul B. Webster VK2BZC wrote:
>> what do you mean by "organ state"? the sounds selected (i don't know
>> the proper english word, in german it would be "register")?
>
>  That's exactly what I mean.  It comes out to about one bit per key,
>one bit per stop.  I am thinking of the versatile PIC; the 16F84 of
>course.  You are probably right insofar as it probably *does* have just
>enough registers = 68.  OK, you win.
>
>> neither to transmit nor to store (eg. in the internal eeprom),
>
>  I don't think that's a goer!  Re-writing EEPROM for every key hit
>would I expect, wear it out.

i guess i don't understand what you want to do. if you want to store organ
setups (that's what i meant you meant with "state" :), the keys are
irrelevant, and the setups change rarely enough to be stored in eeprom
(even if you accompany the player's actions with the stops in "real time").

if you want to store play sequences, that is everything the player does,
stops and keys (including time information), you of course need a different
and much bigger memory -- that would be almost something like a (midi)
sequencer. but in this case i'd probably go with an off-the-shelf midi
sequencer (or a pc) and use the pic only for translation of the
organ-internal signals into midi. which needs no storage at all in the pic
(except for some buffer). without a rather complicated user interface you'd
be limited to record a sequence and then play it back, and that's it...
which doesn't seem very useful to me. a midi interface for the organ, on
the other hand, seems to be something much more interesting.

(i used to play organ, even a "real" one, many years ago. since then i've
been almost only on the piano and on midi keyboards... like fake hammonds :)

ge