Well, I've been out sick from work for two days, but even hacking and weazing, I'm not one that can just lay around (that is, unless I'm +really+ bad off, which fortunately doesn't happen much).
So, a little time for the Arqadium!
Got it all pretty much back together, rebuilt the PC, replacing the Mobo, replaced the subwoofer to get the sound going again.
Had some trouble getting the new gigabyte drivers for sound/lan/onboard video, etc installed (since the old board was an asus, and I didn't completely reinstall windows, the old drivers seemed to be pretty tough to get rid of).
But eventually got all that sorted.
Fired it up and tested out all the input devices. Still golden!
So, how about all the new LEDs and elwire?
Ugh. Load up LEDBlinky and fire off one of the canned animations and I get USB device drop "boings" all over the place.
I figure I've got an over current issue, but yuck. Here's what the underside of a quad player cab with dual trackballs, a spinner, 2 u360s, 2 LEDWizes, and miles of wire looks like.
Ok, its not normally that bad. I've got some jumper clips out bypassing some of the normal power wires to use an external power source for the LEDWiz for testing (plus the ever present voltmeter!)
So I start disconnecting USB devices, rebooting, wash repeat.
Eventually, I was able to narrow the problem down to....
1) the big one is the USB ELWire driver module. It says 100ma, but I'm thinking it's drawing way more than that, esp since I'm using the LEDwiz via a couple of optoisolators to control the ELwire, so it's switching on and off very fast, just like it does LEDs.
2) 2 Jumbo super bright LED's I picked up from radio shack ages ago. I'm using them to light the trackballs. The specs say 20ma, but I'm thinking it's considerably more. If I power JUST THOSE TWO led's via the USB 5v that's available on the LEDWiz, it's enough to take down the hub it's attached to.
Moral of the story. If you're driving anything other than just the small usual LED's, it's probably safest to pick up a 5v power brick (mine came from an old DLink router, and can do 2.5amps), then wire an inline fuse on the line, just to be safe. If you get any weird behavior, esp from your other USB devices, that's most likely the issue.
But, bottom line is, now the Arqadium can run all the canned animation patterns that come with LED Blinky, with no issues at all!
I'll get some video once I get everything battened back down.