This became tricky. It was suggested to us to use a 1000 ohm resistor to intercede between the LogoChip and the transistors. We found that this was not enough resistance, however; it made the transistors too sensitive. This problem was marked by the DVD powering on and off without our telling it to. This was humorous, and became even more so. At one point, when I had been working on this for hours, I grabbed the wire connected to the resistor on the base of the transistor and the ground to move them and the DVD player turned on. Intrigued, I held the wires on the insulation, and laid a finger across the exposed ends of the wires. It did it again! T. Jay came in soon thereafter, and of course I showed him this comical phenomena. He tried it, but it didn't work for him. We looked at each other for a moment, then his eyes lit up, and said, "Wait a second!" He grabbed the wires again, then touched my cheek, and lo and behold, the DVD player turned on.
We did increase the size of the resistors…eventually. We found values so large that they blocked the signal from the LogoChip, and slowly stepped it down until the LogoChip just overpowered the resistors enough for the transistors to get the signal. We wanted to take no chances on someone walking by our project and somehow causing an unwanted signal to make it misbehave. We arrived at 10K ohm, which has a color code of Brown Black Orange.
