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Station Video Mux: Difference between revisions
→32 x 4 replacement
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All the parts were sourced as free samples from [http://www.maxim-ic.com/ Maxim] under various psuedonyms since the MAX458 crosspoints were actually worth about £40 each. | All the parts were sourced as free samples from [http://www.maxim-ic.com/ Maxim] under various psuedonyms since the MAX458 crosspoints were actually worth about £40 each. | ||
To avoid the obsolescence problem that the Breaker 88 unit suffered, there | To avoid the obsolescence problem that the Breaker 88 unit suffered, there were two muxes. A spare circuit board and set of 7 chips are in storage in case of failure, and the controller is made using a cheap reprogrammable micro controller. Some 885 lines of assembler code are all that were required in the micro to perform all of its control functions. | ||
After a dramatic hardware failure at Roses 2010 (late summer), the Mux controller begin to get 'picky' about if it liked working on certain days of the week. It was later discovered that some rather large capacitance had bridged across a pair of control lines, making the system purport to work (the Main unit has no way of communicating back to the controller). With no documentation available, it was decided that replacing the controller with a serial interface was the way to go. By 2012, the new control system was implanted into the main unit, making the old external box redundant. As of March 2012, the machine now conforms to the YVP protocol. Several easter eggs have been programmed into the device - please don't go looking for them during a live show. | |||
==Today== | ==Today== | ||