3 Grinches

[MEMPHIS7291]

Can someone please explain how to link 3 grinch boards together and what plugin and setup to use with vixen. I can get one board to work fine. but when I do 2 boards and turn all channels on, the 2nd board only reads 3VDC, and sometimes, doesn't work at all.
Also sometimes my MBI chips get hot. any ideas?

 

[dirknerkle]

Anytime you daisy chain boards, you should probably supply power to each of the daisy chained boards. The chips get hot because of the current going through them, and I believe there's a patch to that problem involving the clipping of a couple traces and the addition of a resistor here and there... Check the Grinch forum -- look back a couple years ago.

 

[daviddth]

Firstly test each of the 3 boards seperately. The boards use the Olsen 595 plugin from memory, unless you are running a Ren-C on each one to drive them off the Serial port and then it is the Renard Plugin that is used.

3V DC is way too low - power each board seperately, not via the cat 5 as it is a lot less troublesome.

 

[RPM]

Anytime you daisy chain boards, you should probably supply power to each of the daisy chained boards. The chips get hot because of the current going through them, and I believe there's a patch to that problem involving the clipping of a couple traces and the addition of a resistor here and there... Check the Grinch forum -- look back a couple years ago.

I wrote a document on how to add these resistors to a grinch board a couple of years ago.

I'll attach it here.

 

[dslynx]

Just thought I would mention that you can also do individual data pins off your parallel port using the 8-line 595 plugin and setting each controller to 64 and then checking the box next to each data pin you will be using. Then, you just wire each data line off of pins 2-9 on the parallel port.