DISASTER

Well I thinks it's disaster, I connected the the yellow & purple wires, which where connected to pins 7&8 of the Mega & set as outputs, to pins 6 & 8 on the BIII I/O header, I also connected the low side level convertor ground to pin 4 on the BIII header, as per the photo below.

As soon as I turned the Arduino on the LED's came on, on the BIII, I turned it off & reconnected the selector switch but the signal no longer locks (stays on MUTE) and of course no music comes out.

I have no idea what to do know? have I cooked it & how?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edited by user Friday, August 24, 2012 9:41:46 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

All is not lost.

I did some testing after the disaster I tested across BIII Pin 6 to Grnd & 8 to Grnd with the BIII selection switch connected as before and I got:

Pins 6 & 8 on the BIII
Input 1: H & H (3.3v)
Input 2: L & H (3.3v)
Input 3: H & H (3.3v) ??? what the!
Input 4: L & H (3.3v) ??? what the!

This is not what I expected,

I had expected;

Input 1: H & H
Input 2: L & H
Input 3: H & L
Input 4: L & L

Given that I had been using Input 4 for my coaxial input this may explain why it was not working.

So I connected the Squeezebox via my Toslink cable which is on Input one & sure enough it worked & as you might expect by the reading I got it also worked when the selector was turned to Input 3!!!

The lock on the toslink is not perfect but I think it improves with time.

I seem to remember I had issues like this when I first put the BIII together.

Does anyone know what the hell might be going on?

I also suspect my understanding of how the input switch works is incorrect.

Any chance the makers could explain it to this carpenter?

Edited by user Friday, August 24, 2012 11:43:43 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Do you mean that when you use the input selection kit from TPA you can select the first input by setting the switch to position one and also to position three? This seems a bit odd to me.

Certain setups have issues with drop-outs but they are not really directly related to the BIII except in that it uses the ES9018 which has a DPLL bandwidth setting which may need to be adjusted based on you particular source. This is DIY, and everyone's setup is a bit different. :)

Edited by user Friday, August 24, 2012 11:50:37 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I shall point you into to right direction regarding the volume control.

From the pictures I have seen, you are using a stereo motorpot. If you connected it just like Leon's integration guide, you connected only one channel of the stereo pot to the BIII. Now you can use the other (free) channel to read the volume.

What you must do is let Arduino read the resistance of the pot. You can do this by connecting connecting the free channel of the pot like this:

You can use any of the free analog pins.

To read the resistance you need the following code (in blue):

#define potPin 2 // define the analog pin, pin 2 in this case

int val = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the potentiometer

void loop() {
val = analogRead(potPin); // read the value from the sensor
}

The value coming from the potentiometer will be somewhere between 0 and 1023, depending on the level of resitance. The value is proportional to the amount of voltage being applied to the used analoge pin.
When you turn the volume all the way up there will be no resistance and the value will be 1023 (=5 volt to the pin) while turning the volume all the way down there will be 10K resistance (depending on the pot you used) and the value would be 0 (= 0 volt to the pin).

Now you know that reading the resistance gives you a value between 0 and 1023 you can work out a way to show the correct volume. If you used a linear pot this is easy, especially if it doesn't matter if the scale is not a Db scale.

What I would suggest is is using a scale from 0 to 99 to display the volume, this way you would have 100 steps in volume (just like HiFiDUINO).
The easiest way is to devide 1023 by 100. (1023/100=10.23). Now you know that for every step up or down in volume the analogRead value goes roughly 10 points up or down. So lets say you turn the volume up about halfway and the analogRead function return a value of 480. The displayed volume would be 480/10=48.

#define potPin 2 // define the analog pin, pin 2 in this case

int val = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the potentiometer

int volumeToDisplay; // variable to store the volume to be displayed

void loop() {
val = analogRead(potPin); // read the value from the sensor
volumeToDisplay = (val / 10); // calculate the volume
}

Diving it by 10 is not fully accurate, but probably accurate enough. If not you can always change the code using floating point numbers, like this:

#define potPin 2 // define the analog pin, pin 2 in this case

float val = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the potentiometer

int volumeToDisplay; // variable to store the volume to be displayed

void loop() {
val = analogRead(potPin); // read the value from the sensor
volumeToDisplay = (val / 10.23) + 0.5; // calculate the volume
}

Using floating point numbers allow you to calculate it more accuratly, but the calculated volume now needs to be rounded in order to display a two number value. That's why the 0.5 needs to be added to the calculated value.

Knowing how to read and calculate the volume you just need to display it. This code can be found in the HifiDUINO code, but if you don't know where to find it, I can send the code to you if you like.

Edited by user Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:44:55 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi David,

I have never worked with such a display. If you give me some more information about this display (where you bought it, which Arduino library it uses etc) I can try to answer some of you questions.

Keep in mind that when you are going for the HifiDuino approach your display is not compatible with the code. You need to re-write all code for the display. The display that is compatible is a “20×4 LCD HD44780″.

EDIT: I think that I'll such a display in the future because I like the colors

Edited by user Monday, August 27, 2012 11:56:56 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Corpius

Sorry I got confused about who was who, I should have asked bigpandahk as he has added the same screen to his BIII, poor old bigpandahk is living the nightmare at the moment " When a project goes bad"

Thanks for your help.

After MANY frustrating hours I have concluded;

It appears the UTFT doesn't like images exported from CorelDraw no matter what file type you export them as. They will convert & they will compile but they wont load.

I printed the image I wanted, took a photo of it, reduced it's size, converted, compiled, loaded & displayed it, bit of a pain really.

If anyone can tell me why I would greatly appreciate it as I do want to use some images I have created in CorelDraw.

I have been using the Henning Karlsen Converter, the files convert ok & compile ok when placed in the code, but they wont load to the Mega. I'm not sure what CorelDraw is doing to the file when I save it, I have tried saving them in the 3 suggested formats. I will just have to make do with my other approach for the moment.

It's time to move on & try and integrate the rest of the screen display functions, vol etc.

If you work out a way I can get to the sample rate (without removing the firmware) let me know It's the only thing I would like to see on the screen that I probably wont be able to implement using my approach.

After many more hours of frustration I have finally got on top of the image display problem, I can highly recommend using the SD card feature. the size of the images is very limited without the SD card.

Still got a long way to go with the coding to get everything as it should be.

[img=]screen[/img]