I am having problems getting the board to work correctly. Basically at power on ALL 6 LED’s connected light up very dimly and stay lit indefinitely until I power the controller off. I tried resetting the board by holding all 3 P buttons as I power on and tried holding jab to enter setup for 30 seconds or more. Neither of these yielded any results.
My board is connected as follows:
Inputs from each punch and kick push button are wired to each respective “IN” of the toddles board. From there I take the signal to the xbox pcb.
All 6 outputs of the toddles board are then wired to each respective LED inside the push buttons (to the Vcc side of the LED).
All grounds are common throughout the whole stick.
Vcc (5v) is connected from the xbox pcb to the toddles board.
I have tested each connection with my conductivity meter to make sure I have good connections and I have also cross-checked each connection to all others to make sure I have no shorts.
Voltages measured (at outer points of the toddles board since I do not have the pinout of the chip so do not know which pin of the chip corresponds to what connection) are as followed:
Vcc 5v
Gnd 0
All 6 inputs: drop from 3.5v to 0v as each corresponding push button is engaged
All 6 outputs: stay at 2.5v no matter what I push
I have double checked my soldering and wiring as well as each individual LED to make sure it is functioning as intended. No problems found.
are you using KNserts for the led’s? your board looks correct and I’m assuming black is your ground wire.
if you are using KNserts 1.4 did you make to solder signal to the spot marked GND and the ground wire to the spot marked VCC (they were labled wrong during manufacture).
other than that it looks good
Yea at first I had the polarity of the LED’s backwards because of the bad labeling but I de-soldered and re-soldered them all and double checked each LED with a standalone powersupply with a resistor in place. They all work good. The problem seems to lie in the outputs of the board which never fluctuates from 2.5v. I did not measure the current running through the outputs because that would require de-soldering the cables from the board but from the voltage readings alone I can see there is a problem with the outputs.
Perchance you have the intensity of the LEDs turned down?
Hold Jab until the Jab and Strong buttons are flashing, and then continue pressing Jab to turn up the intensity of the LEDs. Press Fierce to exit the setting mode.
I checked for that, I mentioned all I have tried in my original post. Thanks for the reply though. Also, even if it was the intensity of the LED’s which was set incorrectly, that would not explain why they are ALL constantly on.
Sorry. I’m a bad reader sometimes. More like lazy. I do that too often when it comes to big posts. Miss the details.
The chip almost sounds kind of demented, to me, anyways. If you can’t reset or even enter any kind of mode… Hmm. That’s all I can think of at this point.
Here’s a rough sketch of my setup for good measure. But yea, I’m an electronics engineering major and using all logical troubleshooting methods available to me I cannot find a fault in my wiring and such. If i had an schematic or the pinout to work with I could mount the chip on a Breadboard and see if its faulty or not.
Thanks for the replies though guys. Hopefully toddles will be able to solve my problem.
All I could suggest to figuring out the pinout is by looking at the PCB’s traces and making out a schematic of that. I mean, naturally, you’ve got a VCC and a ground, and then just a bunch of I/O pins. I’m almost certain that the resistor arrays are just 150 ohms from pin one to pin two, infinite resistance from 2 to 3, 150 from 3 to 4, etc, and then it’s just two capacitors, so, you could try figuring that out if you’re really into it. But your wiring diagram appears correct, so it’s no fault of your own there.
Yea, I thought of that but tracing and drawing it out would take a long time so I’d rather wait to see what toddles has to say before I invest the time in doing that. I also wondered if the one of the resistors were faulty, that could cause this problem as well I’d imagine but de-soldering a resistor array to is WAY too much work and I’d say its one of the least probable situations. Thanks for your help though
The Resistor array just is 150 ohms going out to each of the LEDs to make sure they’re not directly connected to VCC and Ground, causing the LEDs to draw too much power, and causing the stick to be disconnected from the host USB device.
I have been using this same pcb for many months as a common ground pcb. Were it not a common ground pcb then it would not function how I have it set up, which is one signal wire per key and only ONE ground wire coming out of the pcb from a random ground point. So I’m fairly certain that’s not the case. Also I’m not sure I understand how it would make a difference regardless. All the pcb is doing is supplying the LED controller board with 5vcc and ground. Other than that as long as the IN’s are going from HIGH to LOW when each button is pressed then I see no reason the pcb should have any effect on the internal logic of the LED controller. But just to make sure (because its always the things you never expect) i disconnected the pcb from the LED controller board and connected the LED controller board to an independent 5v power supply. This yielded the same exact results.
If you have any suggestions on what else I can try that I have not yet done please tell me. Otherwise I’d like to request a replacement.
Thanks for the response.
Your confidence is your board is commendable, but a picture of it with wiring would be far more helpful.
Because a matrixed controller may show an average of high when unpressed and low when pressed with a multimeter, but that doesn’t mean they are at those levels when the microcontroller polls the inputs. The alternating high and low may seem like a very rapid press and release, and with the default display setting of ‘fade in/fade out’, the LEDs would look like they were very faint.
That’s even better. Could I see a picture of that setup?
As soon as I’m convinced that a replacement would solve your problem, happily. If the controller completely separated from the main pcb and powered from a separate power source didn’t work, Im pretty damn sure I’d be convinced. Could I see that please?
Might be a bit hard to make out whats connected to what, but here is the power and ground of the LED controller completely isolated from the PCB hooked up to a power supply reading 6.5 volts which i think should work just fine.
Hard to see in a picture if the LEDs are dimly lit up here and stay like that no matter what I push.
And here is my pcb, note only one gound connection and one signal wire for each button.
I could take the time to disassemble the whole thing and show it a bit more clearly but that would take a lot of work and I would have to redo alot of the heat shrink tubing and soldering to assemble it back together and that would show the same thing. (note: the 2 black wires at the bottom of this picture are the LB and RB signal wires. I ran out of wire that night and had to use black)
I was under the impression that the PDP Afterglow’s were not common ground. I may be wrong on that though. The nice thing is that with the LED board, we can get rid of the other influence.
First, verify that the grounds on the KNserts (labelled VCC. Yes, Im very sorry about that) are connected to the GND point on the LED controller. It would suck if they weren’t connected to the LED controller after moving the power over to the wall wart.
Then, desolder all of the wires going to *_IN. We want NOTHING except ground touching the Xbox pad.
Take some jumper wire, and jumper JAB_IN to STRONG_IN, STRONG_IN to FIERCE_IN, and FIERCE_IN to ground.
As long as the power from the wall wart is at least moderatrely smooth, powering it up should reset the defaults, and show the KNserts attached to those buttons light up. You can then cut the wire from FIERCE_IN to GND and after a few moments the cylon screen saver should kick in.
I will try this tomorrow since it’ll take some time since I have to disassemble each button, and the board somewhat. I was fairly certain than in removing the ground and Vcc from the Xbox PCB it would have the same effect as removing ALL connections to it since there is no current flowing through it and each signal wire connected to it would just be a wire connected to nothing (assuming no shorts, which i checked for). I also checked all the Vcc and ground connections to each individual LED after wiring before putting them back in the pushbutton and since the grounds all connect together before reaching the LED controller (within the heat shrink tubbing) changing the power supply would have no effect on this and the grounds should all be ok. Never-the-less I’ll set it up as you mentioned and take more pics. Thank you
