I guess I am not being clear. For me building such devices is a hobby. No different than when I build or repair an organ. As I have said all along, anything I do will most likely be for clients in the US. As with organs I build and repair, if a client wants a player, then I can provide one. I do not go out of my way to push player systems on others. If someone on the iMod was repairing or building the same organ I am, I would probably share my experience the same way. On the other side, as those who do build and re-build organs well know, there is not a lot of time. Most of my comments have been addressed to iMOD readers in the US, who might want a cheaper U.S. domestic alternative. As I wrote elsewhere, to sell such a device RoHS compliant in the EU, would cost twice that of what it sells for in the US. I have no intention of competing against the device advertised and reviewed here. If I am not clear, I do recommend it as it looks like the suppliers of it have done a good job to make it simple and usable. The more of these that are sold, the larger the market for them. It seems there is a different culture in the UK regarding self built electronics. I know there are a number of people in Australia, Greece, Ukraine and Latvia who work with this sort of thing. In the U.S. we called this "Yankee engineering." My favorite book is "Trustee from the Toolroom" By Nevil Shute, which told me about the "Model engineering" that happens in the UK. I was delighted to learn that this was a real world, and that there really were people who built models of traction engines, clocks and fairgrounds organs. In my case I became involved with one of the UK clock societies, which still prints practical plans for building complex clocks. The reason I was bringing this up, is to get younger folk interested in how old pneumatic organs can be controlled by simple electronics. Without young people interested, then this whole hobby is for naught. In 2002 I designed a floppydisk file player with this exact same technology. I extended it the following year to work with Compact flash cards. A year or so I did get some SD sockets. On the floppy based project I overbought and still have a lot of parts left over. I tend to think of these parts the same as the new old stock, that one would use when searching for parts to repair an old clock, watch or pipe organ. They are unused and probably have a 200 year lifespan apart from the planned obsolescence. In practice a few other things put my midi filer projects on hold. First was I now use an older laptop which runs Van Bascoes Karaoke player. There is always mains power to run the organ so this works well and has no limitations. In short, at this time, this is the preferred solution. The other was something called the itty-bitty MIDI which works on a palm PDA. Not to mention all the first year college students who are now taught basic mp3 player (iPod) design as a way of introducing embedded systems. As for using an old mobile, My old one did support MIDI. Not sure it had an output line, but the ringtones were stored as MIDI, So there would not be much work to play MIDI on an old Mobile phone, other than to download the MIDI file into it. That is exactly the sort of thing a young person would think of and would not have the inhibition to dismiss. Perhaps I should have put the picture of my organ and the player into the photographs of organs section, rather than the organ building section. Mostly I wanted to show off the organ that I built and the MIDI system, that I also built. As for hidden costs, I did not charge myself for time, that is where the value of these systems is. Yes there are collectors who can pay others for their time. VAT and import duties are something, I will admit I have had no experience with. I do have a lot of experience with software, over 30 years as I started coding when I was 17 years old. I first typed stuff onto punch cards at age 8. I amazes me that there is a whole generation under 25 for whom this stuff has been part of their upbringing. It is these kids and college level students, whom I want to share these details with, to show that such things are possible, and there is nothing to be afraid of. -julie PS: there is an error in one of the above posts that says
The 512K of flash memory as one of the designers mentioned has to be shared with the code!This is untrue. The ATMEL AVR processors use "Harvard" architecture. The code and data spaces are separate as in the original MarkI and Univac computers. The 512K data flash on the butterfly board and the data flash on the SD card is for data only and can not contain code. The program memory is limited to the 16K of program flash. -jP