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New Product: RGB-Drive
mahuti:
Got mine yesterday and installed them into the Electric-Ice pushbuttons and Led-wiz last night. First impressions;
The leds are very bright.
They can indeed produce a very wide range of colors, excellent red, yellow, orange, blue, purple. The greens are very good as well, but definitely the weakest compared to the other colors achievable with this setup. The nice thing is that with the RGBs, you can get very specific on yoru colors... do you want a WARM green, or a COOL one? Greenish yellow, or reddish yellow? You can even get a pretty convincing white.
One thing I did notice... when I was programming up some lighting sequences, and going for some custom colors, I noticed that the colors were visually different on different buttons, even though the values were the same. I guess I'd just have to chalk it up to slight differences in the leds themselves. Really though, I was trying to make white, and it's VERY obvious when you mixed the colors wrong with white. With most anything else, it wouldn't be noticeable.
Also noticed some vagaries with the Led-wiz software itself... but it's beta... better than I expected really.
All in all, a very successful installation. they lit up on the first try!! (too bad I somehow managed to turn off my trackball & spinner during the process :/ )
One nice thing of note, the 5volt wires were indicated with a bit of color at the end. After I cut them down, though, that coloring was lost. It's not hard to figure out which is which later if you don't keep track while cutting it.
MYX:
Sorry, Randy when you get a minute.
--- Quote from: MYX on January 21, 2006, 10:13:18 pm ---Randy,
What is the mcd of the LED?
What does the other end of the ribbon look like? Is it just an end of a cable that we need to strip and connect to the LW or is it terminated to pins or something?
--- End quote ---
Are the r g & b components the same mcd?
The reason why I ask this is that I will probably go with color with the top 3 buttons on each side and the lower button on my CP so I can mimic asteroids and defender stuff. most of the pre 90's games only used a couple of buttons so I will aim mostly towards them and just put blue in the rest. I want to batch the blue light level with the blue in the RGB Drive. I guess I could just resister them to match or have the LW controll the brightness. I am glad that this stuff came out before I bought everything. This has caused considerable rethinking.
MikeQ:
--- Quote from: RandyT on January 23, 2006, 11:28:37 pm ---
--- Quote from: edge on January 22, 2006, 11:10:33 am ---Question for you: I have a 2 player, 6 button layout, with P1/P2 starts/coins, joystick directionals, etc. I would like to individually identify ALL the buttons on my CP. So if I end up with 25 buttons in total (for example), that would require 100 LEDWiz inputs (for full RB control), right?
--- End quote ---
That would require a lot. Probably not 100, but at least 85. The real question is whether or not you would find it necessary have full color control on all buttons. Of course, if one wanted that, then one wants what one wants :).
--- Quote ---In the original LEDWiz thread, you mentioned that it might be possible to have multiple LEDWiz's on on PC, all with different device IDs (as you do with GPWiz). Then split up the lighting controls, with 1 LEDWiz per player, then 1 for misc stuff?
--- End quote ---
This could certainly be done. I will start looking at what this would entail very shortly. In theory, it's just a matter of giving each LED-Wiz it's own ID number, assigning a handle to each one and adding commands to to talk to them. Reality, on the other hand, might have something else in store.
MikeQ has really gone to the mat for the LED-Wiz though, even making it hot-pluggable! Maybe if he gets bored someone will be able to convince him to expand his excellent DLL for multiple units. ;) But I'll give the OCX a crack as well.
RandyT
--- End quote ---
Trying to catch up on these threads.
It should be relatively easy to support for multiple LEDWiz. One small problem (not a big deal) is that the DLL interface will change. Anyone who has written software to use the old DLL will have to change their code for the new DLL or just keep using the old one. I plan to make some changes anyway to support multiple processes, threads, programs being able to all talk to the LEDWiz at the same time. When I make these changes, I can add support for extra devices. Any idea what timeframe your looking at for this Randy? Looks like I'll need another LEDwiz after all.
With a custom kernel driver, I bet you could use the LEDWiz as is without having a different product ID.
gduprey:
Howdy,
For those interested, also check out the www.rgbled.org site
It's a RGBLED controller project. There are currently two different boards -- a 13 RGBLED board and a 3 RGBLED board. The boards can each have their own unique IDs so they can all be daisy chained together allowing over 2,000 RGBLEDs to be controlled (or 6,000 regular LEDs).
In addition to setting each LED to one of 16.7 million possible colors, you can tell it to do "animations" -- that is color transitions of your choice. That could be a slow pulsing of a color, or a slow wash between two, three or more different colors (or fast wash or "absolute" steps instead of washes). Timing of the color effects can be set from 1/.100 of a second to 254 seconds in 1/100 increments (each LED can have it's own animations and time bases). You can pre-program the controller and store the settings in it so it'll light up with the colors/animations you choose at power up. You can also control it real time via serial or USB (via a USB to serial converter). You only need one serial port/USB adapter to control up to 254 boards.
This is an "open source" project -- all the source code for the firmware and PC board CAD files are available for download. Prototype houses will be able to create the boards for you (for the small RGBLED controller, you can wire it up with radio shack parts (except the PIC chip -- get that online almost anywhere). Once I'm finished with a few things, I will be making the boards available for folks who don't want to fabricate them (bare, with a pre-programmed PIC chip or fully built). That announcement will probably come in about 2-3 weeks.
The larger board even has automatic current limiting onboard, so you don't have to fuss with calculating LED resistor values -- it will auto-adjust to insure each LED is getting it's full current (for super high power LEDs, you can gang outputs together, allowing a board to drive from 10ma per color to 260ma per color). There is also a power driver board design to allow driving lots of LEDs or high power LEDs easily.
In terms of control software, it's very, very easy to control and refitting it into a front end would be pretty easy. For example, sending a command like #000200FF00FF would change LED #0 on board #0 to magenta (1st two bytes are the board ID #0 (could also be FF to address all boards), next two the command 02 - set color), next are the LED #0 (FF again being a broadcast for all LEDs) and the rest is the RGB code for magenta (FF00FF or R=255,G=0,B=255). Follow it with a CR (carriage return) and that's it.
I'm writing my own MAME front end right now that "knows" what buttons are needed for each game and lights only the
right ones (with their "original" colors) for each game. It's pretty specific to my use, but I'll eventually release it in case anyone wants it.
FYI
Gerry
mahuti:
annnnnndddd..... back to the thread.
Make a new topic next time :p