Station Video Mux: Difference between revisions

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(→‎32 x 4 replacement: I've just found the data on the tuners on distel's site still!)
 
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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 are in fact two muxes. A spare circuit board and set of 4 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.
To avoid the obsolescence problem that the Breaker 88 unit suffered, there were two muxes. One live, then a spare circuit board and set of 7 chips were in storage in case of failure, the controller 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.


==Today==
==Today==
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In 2006 the original PIC within the controller was replaced with a PIC18F2455.  This was the first step towards giving [[Spider and SchedSeven]] control of the Mux, although currently the USB side of the firmware is still under development.
In 2006 the original PIC within the controller was replaced with a PIC18F2455.  This was the first step towards giving [[Spider and SchedSeven]] control of the Mux, although currently the USB side of the firmware is still under development.
After a dramatic hardware failure at Roses 2011 (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...
Following the move to HD in 2013, the Mux (along with most of the SD vision equipment) was reassigned for use in [[docs:Kenobi|Kenobi]] - an OB flight trolley, which won Best Technical at NaSTA 2014. Following the acquisition of a better (read: not homemade) analogue matrix, the Mux is planned to be retired in Summer/Autumn 2014.
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