*NEW* USB Input/Output Board -- Fusion Brain

[h3rk]

Good Idea, I have some of those in use at work. There are problems however. First the transmitter is specified to have a power supply of 20 to 50 VDC or 22 to 38 VAC, second, it's going to be cost prohibitive, third, a more simple shunt setup would work and give a voltage output. A current output would probably require a more complex input board, I believe. I think the analog portion of the hardware is set up for interpreting V-mV signals only.


Is there an effective range of voltage on the inputs (sensativity and accuracy)?

[turbocad6]

really, I can't think of anything that a reading of such high amperage would be useful for.. I mean if your going to measure a big stereo or something, then the reading will naturally be jumping up & down to the point of not being very usefull information... I guess maybe the main battery feed, but there too, I think a voltage reading would be more useful information... guess it can't hurt but don't seem very useful in any way I can think of unless your going to run an app that will sample & average these readings...


OK I really haven't had a ton of time to pl;ay with this, but I did build a skin & have it all working in the program, I can now start my car & shut it, arm & disarm, open & close my sliding door & open & close my windows... this is just the basic start of my interface & the rest will be done when I actually install, as far as all the data I'd like to read, but so far I have got all the basics working...

I have noticed a few problems,

1) the stretch doesn't seem to work for the background, seems to tile only... even when I use a 1024X768 background image & build my skin to be the same, it crops the bottom, I had to platy around with size & it winds up having to be like a 1024X730 I think to fill the screen & line up with the image... not to big a deal as the images can be size matched I guess & this only is the main background, scaling of buttons seems to be right on...

2) it would be nice if this could run fullscreen without the windows boarder around the app... maybe it would be removable when embeading in a frontend?, but stand alone would be nice too, the thing then will be there has to be a way to exit the program from a button in the skin....

3)the missalignment with the resolution to picture pixels makes it a little more difficult to place the buttons in one shot, as the x,y coordinances don't line up 100%, not a big deal as trial & error can get them placed 100% anyway...

4) ok this is a biggie... for some reason when I do a button press, sometimes it works perfect, I get a bright led on the output & my micro relay engauges, alls good, BUT sometimes, instead of a bright solid led on the output I'll get a slightly dimmer & like really fast high frequency pulsating led, & when that happens it's not a good enough ground output to pull the microrelay, instead the relay will either not activate or it'll buzz.... maybe a little hard to explain, but it seems like sometimes it's not 100% continuity to ground on the output & you can see this on the led too...

I haven't had a chance to play with the multiple images to make a gauge thing yet, but that's the next thing I want to play with, that & animations...

overall I'm very impressed with this so far & I love this thing.... I definaley want more of these & I think these will also be sick if used in a home system too, I'm already thinking of a bunch of stuff I'd like to use this for... ****, I think I could control my whole shop with this thing with a nice menu style interface

[2k1Toaster]

Well for the tiling or stretching here is something to set in the skin file under the main section.

#TILESTRETCHBACKIMAGE#
TILE
STRETCH
CENTER


As for the output blinking fast sort of thing, that sounds like the ports are mixed up somewhere in the skin file. Either you have an ANTILINK with a LINK so that when it comes on, it goes off too, that sort of thing.

Does this happen to only 1 port? If you change all instances of that port number in the skin to a different port, will the problem happen there too?

[2k1Toaster]

And for #2, I will add an option to run in different border style modes as well. 1 of which would be the no framing of the window.

[turbocad6]

I did #tilestretchimage#stretch, same thing....

so far I'm working with a real simple skin, just a few basic buttons with no links or antilinks... I started with a blank skin & just added a few basic buttons... I'm driving now, but I'll show you the skintext later, but it's real simple as of yet & the output problem is on at least 2 ports confirmed, haven't confirmed past that really, but it def. isn't just one... haven't confirmed if it's all of them yet though...

[2k1Toaster]

I did #tilestretchimage#stretch, same thing....

so far I'm working with a real simple skin, just a few basic buttons with no links or antilinks... I started with a blank skin & just added a few basic buttons... I'm driving now, but I'll show you the skintext later, but it's real simple as of yet & the output problem is on at least 2 ports confirmed, haven't confirmed past that really, but it def. isn't just one... haven't confirmed if it's all of them yet though...

It has to be all in caps for the skin setting.

As for the other problem, I have not had that, but if you use the old software before it became all dynamic, does the same thing happen? I think that is an integral step to eliminating either software or hardware.

[h3rk]

has anyone worked out some successful data recording yet?(analog)

[turbocad6]

oops, I didn't realize the all caps thing, guess that's it, thanks I'll try it later...

I'll try it with the old software when I'm back in the office monday... this weekend I'm going to play with the skin some more & build all my gauge files...

as far as animation, I haven't tried it yet, but are we talking about using a multiframe gif & then listing the number of frames in the skin? I'm assuming that but haven't done it yet....

[greenman100]

oops, I didn't realize the all caps thing, guess that's it, thanks I'll try it later...

I'll try it with the old software when I'm back in the office monday... this weekend I'm going to play with the skin some more & build all my gauge files...

Let me know how that goes. I haven't seen anything like the problem you're reporting

[2k1Toaster]

oops, I didn't realize the all caps thing, guess that's it, thanks I'll try it later...

I'll try it with the old software when I'm back in the office monday... this weekend I'm going to play with the skin some more & build all my gauge files...

as far as animation, I haven't tried it yet, but are we talking about using a multiframe gif & then listing the number of frames in the skin? I'm assuming that but haven't done it yet....

actually it is a seperate picture for each frame, and then it depends how you list them in the skin and to which is the highest and lowest. Then the first numbers on the line are the values to scale the images to. There is an example in the demo skin for the temperature one. You can see that each of those images are in the folder temperature under images, and then the numbers before the paths are there too.