Art and Sound

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.