Hacking the E-mag?

[Have Blue]

Allrighty, I managed to track down the SMT switches used for the pushbuttons...

C&K KN01P3DSAQ, Digi-Key part # CKN1265CT-ND

Will oredr a few next time I get goodies from Digi-Key.

[Sledgehammer]

How much are the green Displays?

[Have Blue]

I'll be selling the green displays for $40 shipped.

[jeffremiller]

Hey Tom... or any moderator.... How about cleaning up this thread? Just leaving the tech info....

Also, HaveBlue, In regards to eyes... how close to the ball and or center of the ball does the eye need to be? I'm about to start drilling :the face of the PF plug. :)

Also, working on a power harness for Warp/Hopper to interface with the emag battery. and building an interlink plug into it as well. That way, my loading system and marker will be nice and neat when the two are separated with the NW QD I bought.

Pretty slick system, breaks down into air, loading and marker very quickly and cleanly.

Also, Tom...if you read this... Do you still want some help with Unix? or your phones?

J_

[Have Blue]

What I do with the photoeyes is use a current limiting resistor on the emitter side of the eye. I then adjust the sensitivity (and thus sensing distance) by changing the value of the resistor hooked up to the detector side of the eye (just like Tom's eye setup, though I use a fixed resistor rather than a potentiometer). I'll look up what values I used when I get home.

So I'd say just mount the eye in the PF plug however you like - this will probably take a bit of trial and error (and a few PF plugs) to get right.

[jeffremiller]

Hey, HaveBlue.... did you get a chance to look up the resistor value for the eye? I'm almost ready to mount the eye but I'm considering where to put the pot (or resistor) I like the idea of adjustability.

How much reprogramming would it tke to get this to work? Since it is looking at the second ball in the stack...will that make a difference?

J_

[AGD]

Hi Guys,

I am monitoring this thread. We are trying to get through end of year stuff right now. PF Plug eye sounds like its going to work well. Post some pics.

AGD

[Have Blue]

Green displays arrived today! Will have them up on my site later tonight, hopefully.



The second photo is a better representation of the actual color of the unit (as shown in the reflection on the right side of the picture)

Jeff - I have scrawled away somewhere that I'm using a 560 ohm resistor to limit current to the photoeye. I believe I'm using a 120 or 150 kohm resistor on the detector side - note that using a larger value resistor will increase the sensitivity of the eye.

Tom, I haven't forgotten about bringing by the camera - will be able to as soon as I get my winter car. I keep bugging my boss aboout finding the manual for the unit, but he seems to have misplaced it somewhere in his basement (where he had been using it to analyze his golf swing :-)

[BlackVCG]

Anything achieved with respect to the ACE in the PF plug?

[Have Blue]

Probably not - I still have to get a Warlord board out to jeffremiller for him to use (but I have to modify the beast first - hopefully one of this week's many many projects).

Regarding the pushbutton switches used on the board, I found that the KN01P3DSAQ is now discontinued. The direct replacement is ITT switch # KSS231G (available through Digi-Key as 401-1098-1-ND).

[Pand0ra]

[Have Blue]

Well, there simply isn't enough room for extension. Unless you start ripping out parts of the code, that is. How many people actually use the countdown timer? That would be the first thing I'd comment out of the code in order to add more features or complete the character set.

[headcase]

Yep, bye bye to the timer(and the associated menu that allows you to choose how long it counts down) and the burst modes should free up a decent amount of room.

[Pand0ra]

[Have Blue]

There's minimal bloat in the E-Mag programming - it's not written in C. True, the micro has 2k, but AVR instructions are a whopping 16 bits long! Thus, you've only got 1000 (okay, 1024) instructions max in the program. Also, the LED module does not have its own internal character set - everything has to be stored in the micro. So storing a complete alphanumeric character set wipes out a lot of code space!

Now knowing how the AVR is organized, AGD really crammed a whole lot into that micro.