 So we're going to hand over to Max and Mark and they're going to be talking about Project Awesome. Give them a round of applause. Thank you. Hi, I'm Max and this is Mark. We're here to talk about a little something we call Project Awesome. We're going to tell you about our inspiration for the project, what it is and how it works. Mark had loads of church organ bits and we had a shared interest in making quirky contraptions and I wanted to make use of some of the enormous amount of junk that I had lying around in a place where I live. Our plan was to make something that would enable us to get into festivals without paying. Our first concept was a giant phallic sculpture made of spanners spurting flames which we still might build at some point but we decided to go with something with a slightly broader appeal. But before I get into that, first a little bit about us. Right, I'm Mark. I've always been into radio and electronics and stuff really and fortunately for this project I did work for a while as an organ builder when I left school on actual pipe organs but then I trained as an English teacher and ended up working back in technology again which is where I've stayed really and I've worked on everything from being a corporate sound engineer to designing military intercoms. I started out my work in life as a mortgage advisor and that didn't really work out for me so I became a beer smuggler, I ran a sound system I joined a circus for a while and I eventually ended up as a blacksmith. So as for the organ parts, when I was a teenager growing up in Bristol I got given a medium-sized church organ from a church that was modernizing and as a teenager I thought it would be a really cool thing to own and you know, my parents had a big garage and so it went into storage for nearly 30 years. I thought it might be fun to do something with this organ at Markhard and we document our journey of trying to make the thing work and share it on YouTube. So eventually our first thing that we wanted to do was to make a trolley something like we could push around like a mobile exhibit that we could take around festivals. Then I said to Mark, let's think a bit bigger and we'll mount it on one of my trailers and then after a few beers one night I said to Mark, let's put it on the zill. I was going to go into a long explanation about what zills are and it turns out there's one round the corner so if you want to know what a zill is there's one behind us. But you'll see up on the screen now that these are zills and military traction, the peak of the Soviet Union they're lovely vehicles. They've got six wheel drive, central tyre inflation and a huge V8 petrol engine which is really thirsty, unreliable and in my case completely lacking a starter motor. So this video from day one gives a bit more history of Max's zill. If you can have some sound on it that'd be cool. The Soviet Union is a fascinating bit of Cold War history in itself unfortunately I've left it neglected for some time. Let's have a look. Here she is. This is a zill 131. Although you can't tell at the moment it's a six wheel drive troop carrier general purpose vehicle from the Soviet Union and this particular one was made in 1975 which makes it as old as I am. So that's how it was. It was sat in a hedge. It had been there about ten years because the thing is once you buy a zill there's not an awful lot you can do with it. So I didn't in the end. So this was my big chance to get it running. It had been there for a long time. A hand started for a long time. The starter motor hadn't been I think it was about 15 years since the starter motor failed a bit and the hedge had incorporated itself very much into the truck. Mark was quite dubious that we could even get the thing running let alone leave the hedge. I think it was fair that I was dubious to a degree because it was stuck in a hedge and in reverse with a seized clutch with flat tyres it hadn't been started for years it didn't have a working fuel system. So anyway we'll take a look at the next stage I think. So I said about just trying to find the starting handle really to begin with you know don't worry you're not going to watch the whole thing of me mowing the hedge. But there's the starting handle. So out into the daylight for the first time in many years then what do we do next? I know we didn't. We opened up the bell housing round a crowbar into the clutch and popped it off so that then we could start the thing without it just going backwards into the neighbouring field and upsetting my farmer friend. Here we go in first attempt you've only seen the highlights that was a whole can of Stella well petrol in a Stella can down the carburetor to make that happen. We started it that was a whole can of fuel gone we haven't quite pumped up the tyres yet. Five litres of fuel to pump up the tyres almost pumped up the tyres. So it really seems so unlike the idea of hand cranking a six litre V8 engine while pouring petrol straight down the carburetor was weird enough having the thing actually fire up and run for a while was quite unexpected so things were looking up really. This was our second attempt at starting it this was actually Mark's birthday last year it was almost this time last year wasn't it? Yeah and here's our first ever drive as project awesome. Straight into a wall. That was episode one of our YouTube adventure which has done quite well. It's just gone over a million views now and although most of those things have been in Indonesia for some reason it's gone down a treat in the Far East. So then again you've only seen the highlights but a few more attempts and quite a few more cans of fuel we managed to get it up the hill towards my workshop. The entire journey took about four months it's not something you want to crank every day. I like this bit. Yeah nearly lost the dog at that bit. Twice. So now we had a platform to put our project onto but it was obvious well even before we attempted to start the thing that engine had to go. Now it turns out it's just as cost effective to buy an entire lorry as it is to buy an engine and gearbox so I did. This is an ex-British telecom vehicle we're quite happy we've made it back without being arrested and with a slipping clutch it was quite a triumphant moment wasn't it? Yeah that clutch really did smell. So we've got the engine and gearbox which is the primary reason for buying a DAF it also gave us a box which we could put the organ in that we're going to build but on the DAF it's much too big it would overhang the zeal hugely so the first thing to do was to mow a metre off of the box to make it more proportionally correct for what we wanted. So what we've got going on here is this really, yeah circular saw. We had Mark on hand with a camera in case things got exciting. I was hoping they would actually in secret. It was quite a worrying moment when it went so I thought the whole thing was just going to fall off. So that's removing the extra metre from the walls and the next bit which I ended up doing on my own a few days later I had to take that front piece and then stick it back on to make the new box this turned out to be quite awkward on my own. I bet it was easy to drop it. Yeah, it's quite easy. There we go. And you'll notice that when I get it back up I then ram it into the roof a few times and give myself some more work to do repairing fibreglass later on. But eventually I got there and as I was saying to Mark earlier I didn't lose my temper and throw the thing into the hedge which was great. Well it would have certainly been easy with two I think all three and a crane. There we go, come on you can do it. Yeah, it was down to the bottom. There we go. There we go. Right, so now we've got a four metre long box which is just right to go on the zill and the next stage is to fill it with organ. Probably most of you are familiar with a church organ which is something where you see all the pipes. The donor for the first part of our project was a church organ and we're going to incorporate that into the project but we're also going to add a lot more of theatre organ parts. Theatre organs are something that you don't see very much because they tend to be part of a whole building. More familiar I guess would be fairground organs. We've all seen these and they tend to make a dreadful noise. There's what they do. Everyone who goes to steam fairs has had to endure these things and they're a really loud offensive box of whistles which is nice because we want to be able to do loud and offensive but the big problem with fairground organs is that they're not fully chromatic so you can't play all the notes and also they tend to have a limited capability of the kind of sounds they can produce. Although they have high pressure pipe work which makes them loud they wouldn't quite be able to cover the range of sounds that we'd want to do. Also the important thing about this instrument is that we wanted it to be not just playable via MIDI from a computer but we want to be able to have someone actually come along and play the thing so we kind of looked towards cinema organ parts and the thing with the cinema organs they were designed more to be a kind of one-man orchestra and also had the sort of sound capability to fill massive auditoriums with sound. So I'll just interject to this point that everyone thinks if you are familiar with a tool which probably most of the people here under the age of 80 are not it's something that you imagine you associate with like blackpool ballroom and that kind of hideous music but it wasn't always that way they were initially designed to accompany silent films and the cinema organ was designed to replace an entire orchestra so you can have one guy making all the sounds of an orchestra and what we are going to try and do is bring that back so that instead of just having a fairground organ playing fairground music or a church organ playing church music or a well it's a playing ballroom music we want to be able to do everything from really nice church music to really offensive drum and bass. Obviously that would require a few things particularly the ability to control it by MIDI and the people who designed the even the electroneumatic pipe organs like the world it says the theatre organs back in say the 1920s weren't really considering MIDI any more than they were considering nose bleeding drum and bass so I don't know how many of you have in-depth knowledge of the way that 1920s pipe organs worked you're going to leave here with a bit more knowledge than you've probably arrived with so we've got a little diagram here these are actually, it's a four stage process the blue sections are on there, do they look blue on that screen? that's good, that's excellent the blue parts a wind under pressure inside a box that's what we call a wind chest I'll just say Mark because it's not really clear on here this relates to one tiny part of one wind chest so each rank of pipes has a wind chest and that wind chest is full of what you see here on this picture and it has to go through this entire process just to play one note on the organ it has to have one of these the blue section as I said was wind under pressure and probably not the sort of air pressure that a lot of you are used to I'm not talking about 150 psi the outputs from an air compressor if you tried running a pipe organ on that kind of pressure all you're going to achieve is launching the pipes up through the ceiling that could it's a one off show then isn't it they're expensive pipes of finale but just as a basic anyway these instruments really did represent some of the earliest and most innovative uses of electroneumatic sort of electromechanical systems you have a magnet in the bottom of the chest that when it's actuated opens a tiny tiny valve and it's almost a fraction of a millimetre unbelievably small that exhausts a little leather pouch in the second bit of the diagram you'll see the blue it goes white it's exhausted that little pouch opening a secondary valve that's just a little bit bigger a secondary stage which then collapses a bigger pneumatic motor which again is all wooden leather this was what they've been made of for centuries opening what they call the pallet valve under the pipe allowing the pipe to sound and although that sounds quite a complex process after you've energised that magnet and they're designed this way that all happens in a fraction of a second because when you play an instrument you need that note to sound straight away if there's a long delay it makes it very very unpleasant to play sort of if not impossible so we had all the theory and I had worked on a few electroneumatic systems before on organs when I worked in the industry not much so we thought the only real way to get set about this was to build a prototype with a couple of little wind chests so we had lots of pipes lots of components but we didn't have any wind chest did we really we had nothing to sit the pipes into to make all this process happen so that's what we had to do next was to actually build a wind chest and then try and sit the pipes on it and try and get some music out of the thing so I screwed with a design on the back of a fag packet gave Max a big chunk of plywood and off he went yeah so what you see here is a sheet of plywood I drilled lots of holes in and then cut channels so at the top of the bit of wood there you'll see all the electromagnets and then we got channels going through the wood and this is upside down effectively so if this was the other way up and encased in a box you'd put the pipes on top of it that was pretty much it these parts were all robbed from some random scrap bits of pipe organ that I'd had lying around so we were able to salvage enough to just build this prototype just in the kitchen but obviously power there was nothing without control and we had to drive this thing and we wanted it to be MIDI controllable so I had to build a hastily thrown together control system on Variaboard just made up out of Darlington drivers and shift registers oh god we're running by the time I'm going to speed this up so building stuff of that scale on Variaboard is a little bit tedious it was a couple of nights of this kind of thing but I think as there's a lot of computer programming like people around it I'm going to quickly try and explain how the MIDI software works we've got an Arduino which receives MIDI data via its serial port and that's those note on and note off messages on each of the notes is added or subtracted from 128 bit integer depending on the note on and note off messages all those bits are shifted from the that integer pass through an IO pin to an array of 8 bit shift registers the output of the shift registers are connected to some Darlington arrays which drive the magnets it's a really relatively simple process weirdly it works quite reliably building it on the Variaboard took ages so I think the net for the bigger system it's going to get a PCB designed for it yeah quite a few so like everything we do with this organ the individual part is quite easy to work out but then you've got to do it by 100 or 200 or 300 times to actually get semblers of a tune out thing so we've got I think some of like 56 pipes here we've managed to just chuck on to a couple of experimental wind chests and we'd rigged it up to the control and I mean what better thing to play for the first thing on a homemade pipe organ than Bucks to Carter and Fugin D minor giving this over telephone and at this stage is all breadboard and Variaboard and crocodile clips so this is completely unregulated air as well what we haven't told you is about the entire air regulation system that we need to be able to control this thing properly you saw it there running off of a bouncy castle blower and a pair of vacuum clean hoses so right well it's all looking good we've got an organ that works I've learnt how to tune them when I was a kid so that wasn't too bad all we need to do really now is scale it all up and we needed to make it awesome that was awesome put a bigger scale means controlling significantly more pipes we've got 56 pipes there we needed to upscale it from a few dozen pipes to a few hundred pipes so Mark was off sailing a yacht and I was keeping an hour on eBay and I happened to come across an entire well four rank wind chest that was going for an extra nothing at the other end of the country so I rebuilt my trailer and we set off to Bradford wasn't it yeah three days it took to get it the first part of the journey was made in my 1967 Land Rover towing the trailer up to Mark's then we relayed another up to Bradford it was an epic journey so what you see here is the wind chest upside down and you can probably just about make out all the tiny little magnets on top so this is going to massively increase our capability of noise making the problem is it had been kept in a damp shed for a decade even though the homemade trailer made it up about there perfectly really we had to get it back to the workshop get it apart and see what was going on and in actual fact this was there was a bit of water damage in there there's an awful lot of leather bits and pieces effectively every one of its 244 pallet valves 488 pneumatic motors 244 springs and magnets all had to be checked removed cleaned where necessary replaced the week which is what this time lapse is of we wouldn't make you sit through it in real time it was incredibly tedious and fiddly but a lovely piece of kit that we managed to get our hands on the build quality is fantastically amazing it's full of rich mahogany so we also took the opportunity to split it into two actually so we've got two 128 note the wind chest to stick in the truck just make it easier to mount I'm going to have to move this on a bit because we're running out of time so that's the state we're currently at with the organ build the wind chest was done what a couple of weeks ago so now we've got capacity for an extra 244 pipes which is more pipes than we've got so we're in the process now of either acquiring more theatre organ pipe work which is very difficult or we're going to be faced with actually building that as well which we've not ruled out this was the last iteration of the solenoid driver I was thinking of making we want to make it modular and scalable because if we want to add to it at any point we want to be able to just fill another trailer with crap and plug it in so this is an 8-channel 8-foot board we're going to definitely go to PCB because doing anything more than prototypes on the Vario board is a bit odd right so that's the organ side of the project but it was never going to be just about the organ we wanted to put some other toys on it that we could play music on that we could make a ridiculous truck in itself we want to make a ridiculous show to put on it so we thought it would be rather fun to try building a musical Tesla coil now it's seen to make sense to start small with these things because neither of us had built Tesla coils before and I managed to wind a convincing enough coil that was similar to others I'd found online and I built a driver board out of a load of salvage bits from some of Max's old mains inverters I don't know how many of you have ever seen his channel but he lives off grid and makes videos about it and stuff so as a result he's got a pile of blown mains inverters and battery chargers which is ripe for picking IGBTs and MOSFETs and all kinds of useful power electrics from it was mainly built with salvage bits and it ended up being driven from a 300 volt DC power supply we used an Arduino to receive MIDI signals we interrupted the coils 200 or so kilohertz frequency the appropriate audio frequencies and actually it worked so I think this is is it playing the Russian National Anthem now the driver wasn't quite capable of the power necessary to get proper arcs even so the sound levels of this power were already very low the full power version should make a good solo instrument to accompany the organ I think but it's been a really steep learning curve and if no one's tried building a cell in state tesla coil I guarantee hilarity your broadband router keeps rebooting lights in the house flash on and off with very little other you're constantly replacing starters in crescent tubes it's been brilliant and I've got this massive bag of blown semiconductors you know flywheel diodes IGBTs is quite good I think this is a video with my voltage doubler going pop this is a daily event it's absolutely amazing so really good at blowing up components so the problem is with the coils that we want to put on the truck these are the sort of transistors that we need to be using and that you're into a different league of hedonism there because these things are a couple of hundred quid each if you've got to buy them they should be capable of switching 1200 volts at about 60 amps so blowing these is going to be expensive so we thought perfect blowing smaller transistors and then move on to blowing out the big ones these ones incidentally were salvaged from a scrap electric train anyway moving on we've that's where we're up to with the main core of the project really so what's next I think next is to get the engine in the zeal and make it back into a truck and get a box which is still on the remains of the daff it's still half with us get that box onto the zeal and then start building the organ in it it's an awful lot of work to do we were we were thinking of driving it here but it hasn't got an engine so we didn't we've got a few people involved with side projects as well a friend of ours is building a laser harp which he intends to plug into and use as a MIDI controller to play the organ in various harp I think he wants to put on a ballgown and do some laser harp show controlling the tesla coils I think why not it seems very keen and you've been playing that in your kitchen well yeah I mean to be honest I have been prototyping the laser systems this is sort of cheap laser galbows and stuff ordered from China for me but they're actually really rather fun but so far we've just really used it as an excuse to put the smoke machine on in the kitchen on a night just play around there's plans for other various audio visual effects probably involving propane because me and Max are both quite into fire and explosions and no post apocalyptic soviet truck mounted lightning spewing pipe org and would be complete without the addition of some fire yeah so anyway that's where we're at we're just about on our time limit as well so thank you all for turning up and listening to us ramble on about our completely daft project if anybody's interested in watching further progress I've been told to give you a call to action and watch my videos thanks very much guys we've got time for a few questions let's see some hands one at the back you mentioned the airflow and the pressure we wouldn't be talking normal high pressure stuff what kind of pressure and airflow are you using to to make these noises okay in organ building pressure is measured in inches of wind and church organ pipes start from about 3 inches of wind and theatre organ pipes typically around 10 to 15 and that is just how far that wind pressure can lift water in a tube so if you blow into a tube and you lift that water 3 inches that's 3 inches of wind pressure so tiny pressures hi your proper theatre organ sound is a really big tremulant are you going to have a big tremulant please tell me you are the wind chest I'm so glad somebody here knows yes, no versatile instrument that would be complete without a tremulant a tremulant is something that sits there it's a bellows that wobbles up and down and wobbles the pressure of the wind supply up and down slightly and gives a tremulant of vibrato to the sound and every rank will have its own individual tremulant just like you'd find on a big world it's a talk to us about percussion we left out the percussion bit because we had to suddenly catch up when we were running behind percussion wise we're aiming for some tuned percussion in a typical sort of world itsery way so the usual marimbas xylophones that kind of thing they'll all be pneumatically driven but because we want to do drum and bass having traditionally driven percussion like you'd find on a theatre organ they're always a little bit lame we've yet to come up with a system but I suspect it'll either involve proper high pressure wind or massive solenoids any more questions? if there's any more questions we're going to be in the bar for the next couple of hours drinking lots of beer so feel free to come and buy us beer and talk to us can I, just a quick question can we have an update in two years time? yes we're hoping to turn up with it and make some noise excellent thanks very much guys give him a round of applause