Art and Sound

So to our great dismay, after having worked to get our project up and running once again, it ended up being all for not.  The Logochip decided that it hated us and now just continuously outputs on all pins non-stop.  As sad as it is that non one but Joey, Chris and myself have really seen the project run its paces, it is a satisfying feeling to know that the Family has lived, twice.  

I have now added a picture page.  Since none of the picture are really specific you can use them as references for the kind of time we had trying to put this project together.  Many hours was spent trying to get the DVD players to work and I know Joey will also be posting pictures of all of his work making the TV stands.  Make sure to also check out Chris' blog as I said in my last post for the schematic of our circuit.  

All the new code has been added to the command section of my blog. This is the final code that we are going to use and has proven to work so far. Chris and myself saw it run 3 times flawlesly before we left so it should be effective. Pictures in general should also be posted soon and both Joey and Chris' blogs cover the other aspects of this project such as the building of the TV's and the layout of the circuit board used in the DVD players. 

My Commands Page 

http://tjkalthoff.wordpress.com/commands/

Joey's Blog 

http://cappy.wordpress.com/

Chris' Blog 

http://michaelangelo3.wordpress.com/

So we have a new mother TV.  We have two new DVD players that are both wired in and ready to run.  So we begin again.  This time we will tweak the code more to get the timing down better since we were unable to do so before I had to leave opening week.  

So after I had to unfortuneately leave early on the Thrusday before the show, I found out on the Tuesday of my return that the mother TV and both DVD players had been shorted out and no longer worked.  After numerous attempts to trace the problem it was determined that when Joey was using the glue gun he accidentally touched the tip of the gun to the motehr TV tube and the ground wires he was attaching.  I can only assume that everything was plugged in for this to be the case of our dilemna, essentially running 120 volts through all the circuits on the mother TV and DVD players.  

We will attempt to correct this issue.  I am in the process of acquiring a second DVD player since Joey already has one replacement.  He is also trying to find a new mother TV.

So after finally finding that only DVD players made by Cyberhome during the time between May 2005 and September 2005 actually function properly, we proceeded to wire up both DVD players to the breadboards and ‘lo and behold, they worked!! So now all we have to do is meet up with Joey and place our piece and wire the DVD players in. What could go wrong?

So Chris and myself spent nearly all day Tuesday and all evening Wednesday trying to get the DVD players to interface with the Logochip. This sounds like an easy task but for soe strange reason only one DVD player actually ended up being functional. After repeated attempts to rearrange the DVD midplane and also rewire our connections, we were unable to establish contact with the “Child” DVD player. So after looking further into the matter, we realized that the power board in the “Child” player was fundamentally different from our “Parent” player’s power board. This lead us to believe that maybe the power outputs we were trying to return were very different on the “Child”. This lead us to the conclusion that the only way to solve our communication problem was to buy a new DVD player.

Finally able to get a computer that will interface with the Logochip like it is supposed too.  Worked out a wiring system using an LED, two resisitors and transistors to shunt the signals on the DVD player control board without direct interaction from me or Chris.  LED was only used to ensure that signal was indeed being sent to the transistors from the chip.

One of the original problems that we noticed was that the transistors are far to sensitive to small variations in voltage.  When hooked directly to the Logochip the transistor could pick up the minute flickers of power on the board and would sit there and turn power on and off to the DVD player.  After aligning a 10k resistor in series with the Logochip signal, we were still able to get our signal through and not have the transistor opening and closing the link every 2 seconds. 

Another issue that was noted was that to control one of the basic and most crucial functions of our DVD players, the skip to next chapter control, we had to complete a connection to ground indtead of to power.  The other three connections being utilized were all able to use NPN transistors as the respond to a HIGH response and act as a switch when used with DC power.  These would not work for our groundings though so we decided to try using PNP transistors.  These ended up not being able to carry the signal either to our dismay. 

So as a last resort we went with a hybrid idea of what John and Tom had given us, use transistors where we could and then use some standard RadioShack relays to control the grounding signals.  Chris ended up picking up some relays and attempting to control the grounded contact. 

Tom was extremely helpful in helping us figure out our serial connection problems. From what we can see the computer we were trying to use just doesn’t output enough power or current to the Logochip in order for it to respond to commands from the PC.

Besides for this both Tom and John ended up helping us determine how to best control the signals needed to control the DVD players. Tom originally suggested relays but John mentioned that maybe transistors might be an easier route to follow.

After having acquired some transistors and a few resistors from John Chris and myself proceeded back to my place to carry out our mad scientist experiments. Unfortuneately for us we were still unable to communicate to our Logochips through the computer we had setup so we ended up just experimenting with different voltages to activate the transistors and ensure that the signals were getting through to control the DVD player.

Will attempt to control the signals to and from the Logochip using the computer in C-6 tomorrow.

The tricky part of our projectright now is that we have been unable to find a computer we can use at our homes that will allow us to talk to the Logochip.  Going to talk to John and Tom tomorrow at C-6 to attempt to troubleshoot the issue of communication with the chips.

Have noticed in the emails for the group that many other people have been noticing the same issue.  Not sure what might be causing it.