Once we got the LogoChip and the DVD players all ready, we took them to the gallery to set them up with Joey's creations. They were beautiful!!!
We ran the video outputs from the DVD players to some RF Modulators so that the T.V.'s coaxial cable had somewhere to connect. We plugged everything in, and sat down to orgnanize the code.First problem: DVD players wigged out! They were turning on and off, opening the DVD trays, it was chaos. I knew that there were some extra currents running back into the circuit, but I couldn't pinpointit. I asked Tom McGuire for some help, and he suggested that the T.V.'s exposed tubes were inducing unwanted voltage on all the wire and conduit we had running around them. So I unsheathed my handy-dandy voltmeter and looked for voltages between the LogoChip ground and different parts of the piece, namely, the structure holding the T.V. We found some. Good-sized ones, too: 2-3 volts. Definitely enough to interfere with our circuit. So we took some wires with alligator clips on the ends and clipped them to some washers on the structure and the conduit, then clipped them on a good conductive part of the DVD player. What we really should have done was connect them altogether and ground them into the powerstrip or something better of a ground. But, the problems went away, and I proceeded to write code to work with the DVD's Joey edited. You can find the complete code on T. Jay's blog.
Problem 2: Tradegy Strikes! Joey was doing some last minute contruction while the project was running, and Zap! sparks flew. I looked at Joey, just astonished, and received the same look in return. Evidently, his hot glue gun completed a ground somewhere and shorted out the system. With that we lost our Mother T.V., and both our DVD players. We had no other choice but to display our piece nonfunctional for the opening evening.
