Discuss older Nikon-based Kodak digital SLRs, including DCS 100, DCS 200, NC2000, DCS 400/600/700-series, etc. Ask questions, post general comments, anecdotes, reviews and user tips.
Well it's been a slow week since i'm rewriting all the code since it was a mess and it didn't worked anymore.
recoding was going nice till i tryed to turn on the back.
nothing worked, tested lots of stuff and it didn't worked, on the last test while programming a new code onto the FPGA the poor DCS bursted in white smoke... A LOT OF IT...
So well.. f**kin caps... till i recap the winder depelopment will be stuck for some days and hopefully it will solve some problems i was having
Hi Stan, yes... i work a lot with vintage HI-Fi, and capacitors are a plague even had unrecoverable devices due to corrosion from leaking capacitors, but tantalums failing... this is new to me
I have seen many tantalum caps crap. They like to alter their Effective Series Resistance, which means they don't show physical signs and even measure capacitance ok. But, aren't ok. Sometimes they smoke, and sometimes they just make whatever they are in work wonky.
Like all other electronic parts there are ones which never crap out, and some which seemingly always crap out. All depends on the supplier coupled with what the item producer decided they could live with. That usually equals cost. But, I have had some suppliers find themselves hard pressed to supply the high-end we wanted, in the quantity we wanted, and fill-in (so to speak). I hate it when that happens!
I recently had a ham come over with an older radio which worked. Most of the time. But, it would take it upon it self to do weird things at times. Mostly in the control circuitry. Sudden frequency shifting, volume running all the way up or down, things like that. Lots of tantalum caps. Some good, most going. Time to 'shotgun' all of them out of there. Not that he felt the rig was worth that.
Stan
Amateur Photographer
Professional Electronics Development Engineer
Hi Stan, for this i want to add a small 128x64 OLED display, designed for arduino mostly, it's i2c, do you think it's worth the effort to code it or i just use an arduino as display controller and feed the data from the fpga in a simpler way, also i will be saving the FPGA memory for the real stuff
Well this is going slooow, i found that my level shifters can't deal with real data or clock speeds, so i ordered new and better ones from the states.. they'll be arriving in a few days, i hope... also comunicating with the display seemed imposible, probably due to the level shifters.
Well, the level shifter arrived, but they are so small that i'm soldering to a breadboard in order to be able to use them and is quite a job... maybe next week will be news about it
from the last post, i wired, tested and nothing was correct, everything was wrong, everything i measured was wrong, the fpga didn't liked at all my board with shifters... or maybe was the wiring... also it was december from a very complicate year and i was tired to debug.
Also.. Argentina is going a big time economical crisis so i moved to Peru... i didn't bring the DCS with me.
But, since here eBay works, i'm starting from scratch with the acquired knowledge, bought a new CPLD, one that can tolerate 5v signals so i din't have to use shifters, also a smaller print pcb but since i'm out of the country for undeterminate time the project is stopped.
Thanks for the support! you know, i haven't give up yet, actually taking advantage of free market in Peru i've bought 2 CPLD boards, much more compatible with the DCS hardware, an SDRAM board for buffer and the programmer for the CPLD, it still remain in its bags but as i return to Argentina, which is next month, i'll start over with it...
Now having better compatibility i can make a cleaner code which allows me for faster coding and better results.
Everything is ready to store all those LED blinks to something so i can read it on a computer and make a file to open in something and see if there is a picture, or something like it.