“Uses an Arduino Due and a stepper motor + driver to control a slide whistle made of 3d printed parts and PVC pipe. Laser-cut base plate.
A project that uses a 3d printed rack-and-pinion, blower fan, an Arduino Due, and a laser-cut base plate in a slide whistle assembly. Project is functional, and mostly-complete, but can use a little bit of tidying-up, It may eventually incorporate limit switch to define a home position (currently requires manual homing).
This project was really fun, and kind of evolved in a very rambling sort of way. It started off in a completely different direction - the plan was to get a reed-based instrument working. At some point, I actually got a saxophone reed to work with a 3d-printed mouthpiece… just barely! And with a 5 foot piece of PVC, it made for a pretty interesting almost-didgeridoo-like sound. After some tweaking, I finally got a fipple to do that, too (in the build video).
Getting a fully functional PVC reed instrument is still a goal of mine, but for the time being, I decided to try out 3d printing a fipple and making a fipple flute. The first working iteration of that fipple is featured in the Cream Cover I did last month.
Long story short, this ended up becoming a slide whistle to change notes. It became apparent that I could re-use some code I had from the last project I did back in May-June 2020 (A “Semi Manual Electric Rail Kalimba” aka the SMERK), and that was a huge plus.
Design Overview
Design philosophy is to use relatively cheap/easy-to-acquire parts like those used for 3d-printers (centrifugal blower fan, 8mm linear rail), and 3d-printed + laser cut components.
Hardware/mechanical design was all done in Fusion360. Some things that required optimization and iteration were:
- the fipple (part of the whistle that air is forced through). I made a blown up and cross-sectioned version for explanation in the upcoming build video(s)
- the height and size of the pinion gear/motor mount subassembly (too large a gear = too much torque for motor)
- the fit of the O-Ring/8mm-rail Assembly (there’s a tiny 3d-printed part there that holds the o-ring, whose diameter took some time to optimize, and it’s still a bit too tight)
The design uses a lot of M3 heated inserts and 1/4-20 screws/tapped holes… mostly because I have tons of these. [Achievement Unlocked: Imperial and Metric in Same Design.]
Firmware and Electrical Hardware:
The microcontroller board used is the Arduino Due with a CNC Shield v.3 w/ A4988 drivers. This combination is a favorite of mine for getting MIDI + USB + NEMA17 Stepper Motors going quickly.
The stepper motor is a 2A NEMA17 from STEPPERONLINE.
The microstepping configuration is set up to 1/8th microstepping. This provides a decent balance of speed and quiet.
The firmware is sort of a rough/ongoing sketch for the Arduino Due. I see this as sort of a quick, but generic “correlate some subset of MIDI to a stepper motor position”. It uses some dead-waits that I’ll eventually design out, but for now it seems to do the job.
Warning: some variables are named for a similar project I have going (Semi-Manual Electric Rail Kalimba, so apologies for the “kalimba” and “flute” inconsistencies). The firmware is configured to use the Y-Axis of the CNC shield as I’ve got some ongoing work on the X-Axis for controlling another instrument simultaneously (will post that project soon, I hope). The code here relies on the Arduino MIDIUSB Library, which is a very simple way to get a class-compliant MIDI USB device working through the Due’s Native USB port.
A pre-processor Macro “#define” for isTuning exists. This enables the user to tune the instrument. Connect via the programming USB port and type a number of steps. Use those numbers to populate the “pulleyPositions.h” definitions.
Fabrication
- The base-plate is laser cut (.dxf’s) on 1/4” clear plastic
- Most other components are 3d-printed
- 1/2” ID PVC Pipe is cut to appx 400mm in length
Some notes on this project:
This project requires laser cutting, installing heated inserts w/ a soldering iron, 3d printing and some tuning in code - I’d recommend really looking it over before starting on it. Some of these things take some time and patience. Please feel free to pillage elements of the design for other projects and/or just to look at it and get some ideas. Thanks for checking it out, regardless!”