Playing chiptunes on an old reed organ with Arduino

After finding an organ left outside to rot, hacker “tinkartank” decided to use it for his own purposes, adding push buttons under each key as inputs to an Arduino Mega.

He also reused the control rods with potentiometers as a secondary input method, and added a tiny OLED to display the system’s menu. With this unique interface setup, the Mega drives a MOS6581 SID chip—originally used to produce sound on the Commodore 64—for music generation, and can interface with Eurorack modules as needed.

Want to see more? Be sure check out the SID organ in action below, and read the entire project write-up here.

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