ipac issues (resolved)..

[dkersten]

Finished getting LED's wired up this afternoon, and now some of the buttons on my ipac ultimate don't work.. !! 

I can confirm voltage at the pin on the board, and watch it go to zero when I press the button.  The signal is getting there, so I am stumped on how to fix it.  And it is an odd set of buttons that were all working before.

Player 1 buttons 2-4, player 3 buttons 1 and 2.. The rest work fine..

Anyone have any ideas?

I am using all but 3 LED outputs on this board.. Every single input I can use for buttons, and nearly every single LED output.  My 5v external source is the PC, and rebooting doesn't fix it.  And the ones that aren't working are all more or less default button assignments.  I am incredibly frustrated at the moment.. I had almost everything I wanted to get done for now finished and now this!! 

normally I would start unplugging things but connecting these LED's is a time consuming process that I don't want to start over on.. besides the LED's all work fine, it's the keyboard output from the button presses that is the problem.. Those haven't changed in a week and were working fine even last night... 

ANY ideas?

[kiwasabi]

I would probably just contact Andy directly at andy@ultimarc.com with this information. He has always been very helpful.

[dkersten]

I had to shut down the computer, unplug both the power and the usb from the ipac, and then bring it all back up and finally it works.  Thank God I have easy access to the bottom of my CP, seems like I need it daily now.

This thing is really touchy and sleep modes really screw it up.  But now that I have turned off any real LED animation, it functions a lot better.  If you are getting one, just keep in mind that animations REALLY bog the processor down and keep it from working very well.  I had a simple animation that cross faded the trackball through 4 different colors while keeping the rest one color.  When it was running, it would take an extra 30-60 seconds to launch a game, the trackball and spinner barely worked at all, and as I selected games it would only sometimes switch to showing what the buttons are for that game.  If I didn't catch it switching to the mode where it showed the controls for the game and launched while the animation was running, it would not stop and none of the controls would respond in the game reliably, and getting out would really just mess everything up and require a reboot to work again.  Deleted the animation, stuck with a single frame animation with a really long frame time and now no problems.  No cool color changing trackball, but at least things work.

[dkersten]

An update, Andy found a bug in the firmware and fixed it and sent me the new one to try out.  I will install it today and see if it takes care of it.  I am impressed with his dedication to having a good product.

He also explained that none of the keys, by default, will send a wake command, but one can be programmed to.  This would solve my sleep issues, so I am looking further into that.

I removed the animation I had running while MaLa was idle and it fixed the slow performance, and I sent details to Andy so he can try to reproduce it and see if it can be fixed.  It would be really great to have a good animation of my lights running while in MaLa but still be able to have it quickly switch modes to show buttons for a specific game, and to not bog down the optical controls and make them pretty much non-functional.  But frankly as nice as it would be, I am content with just having one color set to all the buttons while nothing else is going on.

Had a party at my house last night and the arcade was a huge hit.  Three friends ended up playing through golden axe all the way through, lol. 

They did tell me though that sometimes the key combinations with 3 people playing were minimizing windows and the such.. I have to look into disabling all windows hot key commands while in game.  Particularly alt-enter