F**king finally - opto's are online!
Pardon the french, but I've been troubleshooting the optos for 6+ months without success, and yesterday the solution came to me lying half-awake in bed... It's stupidly simple, has a few downsides - but it works.
After a few months of this...
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| 1) Breadboard horror... |
I realized (but not sure why) there was no power reaching the +3.3V line that powers the opto's. Come to think of it, pretty much all +3.3V devices are powered by the Chipkit already... hmm hmm.
Turns out it was easier to create a new circuit on a breadboard and use a regular remote to trigger the IR receiver. This allowed me to see exactly what worked, and I could then apply the same method of troubleshooting on the board itself.
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| 2) Dusty horror.... |
Anyhow - I suspect a grounding issue (remember way back when I had problems with the +5V line not functioning correctly, or rather some of the MCP23S17 IC's would not work) so I simply took the same approach here. Basically, allowing the Chipkit to force the current the right way, since I suspect they're better at designing PCB's than I...
And sure enough - we got opto's.
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| 3-4) Opto off and on. Tried and tested in the VUK, so it works properly with a ball too and not just some giant hand covering it up. |
Bloody brilliant!
Pretty happy that I didn't had to make any (more) changes to the PCB and/or create external circuitry. This was also the last remaining hardware that needed to be solved, so onwards to creating the actual game!
Still here?
What do you mean 'downsides'?
Well, yes.
This change has pretty much rendered the fuses on the +3.3V and +5V lines completely useless as power will be drawn from the Chipkit (also) regardless. I have moved the screen to it's own power line now though, so worst comes to worst - only a few MCP's will burn to a crisp in case of failure.
I hope.
It'd be great to see an updated gameplay video with callouts and all of your updates since the last one quite a few years ago! Such a cool project and great theme!
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteUnfortunately there hasn't been too much updates the last year(s?) in those areas since time, patience and willpower hasn't been that great. But there has been updates, just mostly stuff that doesn't translate well into videos or posts. :)
I am proud of the new code base though! It's a breeze to add and edit, having switches using callbacks allows for nice compartmentalization of various features etc. And performance is numbers better than before, as well.
But as for gameplay, there's pretty much none at the moment. Took longer than expected to move from the old code base to the new and I've only just now started with the actual game programming (again).
Hang in there, soon there'll be some juicier stuff to show! 8-)