Yup, it plays the Somerset Wassail!

It still needs a set of pushbutton controls and a wooden case, but it’s finished enough to play tunes.

Here’s the story since my previous post:

Using the fixture I made, I routed out the vertical slots for the solenoids:

Then (badly) routed the horizontal slots. the vertical slots keep the solenoids from twisting or falling over; the horizontal slots keep them from slipping down.

Here’s a test, putting one solenoid in its place and holding it with a cable tie.

I then adjusted the height of the solenoid bar so that the solenoids would have room to hit the chimes. I tested the height and position (left-right/top-bottom) with a ruler so that the solenoids would hit the centers of the chimes.

I then soldered a length of speaker wire to each solenoid (with a heat-shrink cover over the solder joint)…

…then crimped on a Molex connector on the circuit end so that I could plug it into the breadboard.

Here’s what the chime looked like in mid-construction:

Once I’d added all the solenoids, I placed the chimes on the board and voila! It played Somerset Wassail.

In my next post, I’ll use the Open Source Aria Maestosa (I’ve since changed to MuseScore) to write up a few more public-domain carols.