Josh’s tech art and sound blog

Today was more hectic than yesterday! I got to shift space this morning at around 9 in the morning. I did many different coding tricks to try and see why my chip was not working the way it should have been. I would set the chip and then see if the bit had been set. It would show me that it was high and I even checked it with a multimeter and it showed high. The problem was that even though the pins came out right, the motor that is going to be turning the dimmer switch is not working. I worked on it all morning and finally had to leave for a while for another class. When I got back to shift space, Tom was there and I asked him for help. It turns out that I had pushed the breadboard far enough through that it was not making contact with the logo chip. After he solved the problem, that part of the code worked. However, I still had a little bit of problem with my code since I had changed it so much. Also, since we had to move the breadboard in order to fix that problem, it knocked out some of the resistors in our digital voice recorder breadboard. It seems, that at this point fixing one problem only creates 3 other problems. By this time, it was getting to be show time. So, I threw together something at least "seems" like it works.

Well aside from frying my finger with the soldering iron, almost electrocuting myself, and trying to cut my finger off, today went really well. After wiring the chip up initially with spare wires, I decided it would be a good idea to get to radio shack and wire them up with a wire kit to make it neater to work with. I encountered many problems today. I should say first that the digital voice recorders that we are using have a 5 volt offset voltage so when I don't capacitively couple them that is what makes the noise I referenced earlier. The good news to this is that with Tom's assistance, I figured out how to wire the amplifier up. The bad news is that the original board that the voice recorders were on no longer works so Ann and I "quickly" wired the voice recorders up on a bread board enabling only the extended play option. Thirdly, because of this extended wiring, we have not had any time to go through and troubleshoot the program so I am planning on going in tomorrow to try and make sure we have working code (crossing fingers). Finally, the values I am getting off the photo resistors is inconsistent with what I expected so I will be looking for a little help with that tomorrow.

Istarted wiring the board today. I common grounded 1 wire on each of the speakers together. I did a similar thing on the photo resistors. I figure that this will give me that many fewer less wires to mess with.

We moved the wallboad down to shift space today. From what I can see, it looks great. Ann has put 2 pieces of plywood around the board to protect it while carrying it. This will also make it easier to wire things together. We should start working on that in a couple of days.

I got some really good help from Tom! He's the man! He has found a motor that will go around the dimmer switch and turn it both ways depending on where the voltage and grounds are set. With a little glue and a little luck who knows what might happen! Here is a picture of what Ann has complete so far….

I went to Radio Shack and bought the rest of my amplifier chips. I think we are going to downsize so that we don't have so many wires streaming from the chip. Maybe 6 or 7 speakers would be just as good.

I think Ann has decided that she wants to have one cutout for one side of the doorway while she wants a complete wall on the other. She has these really cute dogs that are made the same way that the wall is made. She would like a bench to put there too to make it look more "garden" like.

I've been working on this 386n audio amplifier and can't find a way to make it work consistently. I have looked up several different ways to hook it up and it seems like everything is hooked up correctly. However, there is nothing but a buzz coming out of the speaker. I guess a buzz is better than nothing, but it is still a long way away from what I want to use.

OK so I have most of the code written I think? I can't get it to work quit like I want it seems any time that I put a wait in the program it waits far longer than I want it to wait. I would like to find a way to make it wait on what part while still executing other parts of the code. I am not sure that the logo program is capable of doing this though.

We looked at shift space today and talked about how we are going to put up our board and locate our chips. Keith helped a lot with telling us how to hook up our dimmer switch to a light.