What's new
By:
Filters

Custom JVS I/O - MEGA JVS

rufus said:
This is going to be a DIY kit or almost ready to play board? :)
Click to expand...
I don't know what the options will be at this point. I designed it with through hole parts and modules so that it can be assembled pretty easily by those with even the most basic of soldering skills. I may be willing to sell a couple assembled on my end, but doubt I would want to do that long term. It's not something I enjoy enough to do for others and I'd have to factor in some kind of billable rate that no one would want to pay. Once I partner with @Mitsurugi-w it would kind of be up to him to determine what he wants to offer, whether it be an assembled kit or DIY.

Costs haven't been nailed down yet, either, so I'm not sure what a DIY kit will end up costing.
 
V2 boards are in!

Overall I'm happy with the results. I compared to my V1 red boards and I think the blue solder mask show imperfections in the finish more than the red.

Some of these blue boards also seem to have silk screen issues here and there where the white wasn't applied evenly and I think the high contrast between the white and dark blue makes those more obvious than on the red.

The V2 board has a few cases of where some very tiny text is used and those came out legible, which is great.

Fate may be conspiring against me for getting one assembled for testing today. We'll see.
 
Forgot to post this!
 

Attachments

  • MEGAJVSV2.jpg
    MEGAJVSV2.jpg
    78.6 KB · Views: 185
Since I suppose the 80/90% of the final price will be to cover R&D and software development, think maybe to split the payment in two obligatory purchases.
One for the bare PCB and one for the software so overseas customers can avoid to pay an awful lot of money in import taxes for a software that we will download anyway.
Just my 2 cents :D
 
Last edited:
I'll be getting a V2 board assembled and tested today.

A part that's vexing me is inter-board mounting hardware for the screen and SD modules. Each of these boards have holes in the corners and I included mating holes in the MEGA JVS V2 boards, but I'm having a really hard time finding spacers or standoffs that will work. These boards are only going to be soldered in at one side where the pins are, and would ideally get some support on the opposite end.

The smallest hole I'm working with is 0.063in or 1.57mm. A #0 or M1.5 screw might fit, but would maybe be safer at #00 or M1.4. The problem is that I'm not finding good options at these small sizes. I was thinking there would be some kind of small nylon clip that could go into these holes, but those don't seem to go anywhere near this size, so a standoff with the small screws might be the only option, but even then I'm not seeing a whole lot. Digikey doesn't even seem to have sizes down this small.

Worst-case scenario might involve some nylon washers between the boards and a long enough screw to go through the boards and come out the other end where a nut is used to fasten it all together.

At McMaster Carr I'm seeing some options for threaded spacers at #0 size, but not smaller.

The small parts I'm finding are pretty pricey, too.
 
So far so good!

Display works, JVS communications is established, and inputs/outputs are working in JVS test on the Chihiro. Oh and I've got stable analog readings with the caps installed.

In this test board I've only installed the minimal parts needed for my setup, so only one cap per the 3 analog channels used, and only 3 output MOSFETS for the 2 stock outputs and an extra for miscellaneous use like enabling Namco FFB.

MEGAJVSV2-working.jpg

The micro SD module goes on the under side:
MegaJVS v2 under.jpg

Without inter-board supports, I think the display would probably be OK being soldered into the header. In my test setup, it's detachable, and sitting higher than if it were going to be permanently installed.

The SD module is relatively secure when soldered in and would probably be fine without supports as long as the user is careful, but I'd still like to figure something out.

Now that I've got a good setup for the SD card, I can dig into figuring out the best implementation for its use in profile management. I've got a little learning and experimenting to do on that front.
 
  • Looks great this is moving along nicely . Put me down for one your pre-made ones, don't Think my soldering skills are up to it. How does the software side of things work? Can we change the button mapping ourselves. Really great work
 
Rorysean said:
Can we change the button mapping ourselves. Really great work
Click to expand...
That's part of what I'm working on with the integration of SD cards.

I want it to be relatively easy to get set up, so for those who don't want to mess with compiling code in the Arduino IDE, I'm thinking the first public release will come with a pre-compile file that can be loaded onto the Arduino. Though I haven't looked too closely into the options for that.

Profiles can then be managed on a PC with the SD card.

Because of the way I think I need to store the profile data for use in my code, I'm considering going so far as to write a PC based app to create and manage profiles to make it so you're not just staring a bytes in a hex editor. So you would be able to use that to add or edit profiles and then pop the SD card back into the MEGA JVS to use.
 
That would be amazing to be able to put it in the PC and edit profiles Using a profile Editor. I want it now.
 
Well the SD functionality came together much quicker than I thought!

I dumped all of my profiles to a file and the MEGA JVS now exclusively gets profiles from that file. Each time the profile is changed, the position of that profile within the file is stored separately and used to recall the last profile used when the MEGA JVS is power cycled.

It's working the way I want it to and isn't adding any noticeable time to the profile switching when pressing the profile button compared to when the profile data was stored in program space.

I need to code some error handling in, but it's dynamically reading the profile file and accommodating for the number of profiles it finds there, so new profiles should be a simple matter of adding them into the file. Currently that would involve a hex editor with an altogether unintuitive data structure. Though from the perspective of the MEGA JVS, things are pretty much good to go. A simple PC-based app can be thrown together to manage profiles in this file.
 
freddiefiasco said:
Will the recommended Arduino be the MEGA or the UNO?
Click to expand...
It's never been UNO! :P

Do you mean DUE?

For now I'm recommending MEGA 2560 R3 and I don't think I'll be officially supporting DUE at first, if ever. Once I nail down the functionality in the MEGA, I might test it some more. Since I've been able to accomplish everything on the MEGA, there's no reason to complicate things with the DUE that has less compatibility with many libraries and isn't even officially in production anymore.

The board should still be technically compatible with a DUE. I left in the jumper for switching between 5v and 3.3v, but the first version of the software I release may not end up compiling for it without some work. We'll see.
 
is there a technical reason for going with the mega over something more compact/less expensive?
 
twistedsymphony said:
is there a technical reason for going with the mega over something more compact/less expensive?
Click to expand...
werejag said:
mega is like 8 bucks
Click to expand...
This, if you're OK with buying clones, which are basically all I've gotten so far.

Other than that it's a matter of having enough digital inputs, outputs, analog inputs, and serial ports. When I was originally researching, I didn't come across anything comparable, other than the more expensive DUE on the same footprint.

Granted, if I only wanted to accommodate for my OR2 cabinet that has 3 analog channels, 4 digital inputs and 2 outputs, I could significantly reduce the pin requirements, but I wanted to max out the potential and have the capacity for all pins on the I/O connectors be usable.

With the extras I've implemented, there are very few unused pins on the MEGA.
 
winteriscoming said:
freddiefiasco said:
Will the recommended Arduino be the MEGA or the UNO?
Click to expand...
It's never been UNO! :P
Do you mean DUE?

For now I'm recommending MEGA 2560 R3 and I don't think I'll be officially supporting DUE at first, if ever. Once I nail down the functionality in the MEGA, I might test it some more. Since I've been able to accomplish everything on the MEGA, there's no reason to complicate things with the DUE that has less compatibility with many libraries and isn't even officially in production anymore.

The board should still be technically compatible with a DUE. I left in the jumper for switching between 5v and 3.3v, but the first version of the software I release may not end up compiling for it without some work. We'll see.
Click to expand...
haha sorry.

Yes I meant the Due.

I use an UNO for my other projects and mixed them up.

I agree with you tho, the R3 would be the best option if my two cents matter any.

:)
 
I had a fun bit of troubleshooting with the V2 board and the View Change lamp on my cabinet. The V2 board resulted in most pins being reassigned.

It was just a cascade of problems that started with me making the wrong assumption that View Change was output 2-1 when it's actually 2-2. Because of that mistake, I populated the wrong MOSFET, so the output was never going to work until I populated the correct one for 2-2. After I did that, I fixed the output designation in the code, compiled, uploaded and was still not getting the lamp to light! I started to suspect a hardware issue so I replaced the MOSFET and still had no luck. Then I started to panic thinking maybe I hadn't routed a trace correctly. I checked the schematic and board design and everything was routed to be able to drive this output... ?( So I went back to thinking it was a software issue. I was about to push out code that would turn on all outputs so that I could make sure the lamp would light or at least rule out a bad bulb, and then it struck me: The profiles are now managed on the SD card and when I dumped them originally they were dumped with the wrong output pin tied to View Change... :cursing:

What I love (and hate) about software debugging is that you find that the code only ever does exactly what it's told to do... just not always what you intended for it to do. :D
 
@winteriscoming can you add a USB host ? i have written my idea in a other tread when you have a USB host you can use it to remap a lightgun to the analog signals so you have a lightgun for real Hardware like naomi !
i want to use a Raspberry to make this but the Timings a Horrible will test it with a DUE.


The Ideas on the Raspberry was that you can use it as an multigame loader with on screen menu like

Press p1 Start and P2 Start @ same time Raspberry Switch the VGA signal to the Raspberry loader menu comes on and is controlled by the joysticks or something else when the game loads the use the informations from the Rs232 port of the Dimmboard to look when the game is complete loaded and the raspberry swich back to naomi Hardware.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top