ColorChord - A Steampunk inspired creation

This might be madness but ColorChord now has a three note cardboard color keyboard to play a very simple tune on. I have just managed to get the first crude keyboard to work.

In the process of mounting the three color cards.

I have finally gotten around to drawing the block diagram of ColorChord. There are few actual circuit drawings because anyone who wants to give this a try can choose what ever circuits they want to use for each section. I am sure that ColorChord can be reduced to palm size with a little bit of effort.

I just received word yesterday that ColorChord made it into the top 20 for the HCI challenge. Wow, I never thought it would go that direction and I was just about to scrap it for the parts to use on other projects. Guess not :-D

Now I need to dust it off and tidy up some loose ends.

ColorChord is just about finished. All it needs is a 9 volt battery installed and it will be final. For what it does, a single chip could have done but there is a lot of Love, Learning and Art in this project :-D

The board now has a working sequencer. The entire board had zero wiring errors and worked first time.

The clock and master/slave flip-flop is wired and working and hard to believe no wiring errors so far.

The timing and control board will have three sections. The master oscillator then the Master Slave Flip-Flop and then the Sequencer. All three will be on  4.5 X 6 inch cardboard.

The Clock is a two transistor multi vibrator feeding into the Sequencer at about 20 Hz. The DTL circuit is adapted from the Tiny Tim CPU project by Rory Mangles. Sequencer outputs A, C and E were used for ColorChord.

Just finished wiring up a new clock for ColorChord. Using the same circuit as used with IO but oh so much smaller and still on cardboard.

Measures about half a cubic inch.

ColorChord is sounding much better now that I have separated the notes a bit. I have tied into IOs sequencer and added a buffer gate for each note.

Well, let me think on this a bit.... I have been messing around with some very basic synthesizer and switching circuits and think that instead of all three tones playing a simultaneous chord, I will switch between the three so that each can be heard more clearly. All I need is to reduce the size of IOs clock and sequencer so as to fit with the handheld scanner.