Art and Sound

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.

Got my hands on one of DVD players and started reconnecting wires and redirecting the power being run through the control panel. After a sit down with chris and some documenting we realized that with just five taps into the circuit board we could carry out all of the combinations needed for our project.

A sort of organized schedule was setup for our group to make sure we would be able to accomplish our project on time for the Shift Space showing.

Done by Thursday April 20:
 - motion sensor integrated with Logochip
 - Chris and TJ have gotten together for at least one hour playing with
DVD player and Logochip

By Sat April 22:
 - one DVD player interacting w/ Logochip

By Tuesday April 25:
 - 3 DVDs should be linked and synchronized

By Thursday April 27:
 - project is complete

Going to try our best to accomplish this.