Correct, and that is what you need. The caps keep the DC for the automute out of the audio circuitry. You need to apply DC to the top of the pot, and take DC off the wiper prior to the cap. If the DC for the auto-mute circuit is completely isolated from the supply for the device, ie, no common ground, no common +, then there's no need to worry about the AC signal being attenuated by finding a path through the DC supply circuit. If it is not isolated, then it becomes a try it and see, with possible difficulty setting a DC level at the top of the pot that works.
If you can't isolate, then there is another possible approach. You could apply narrow DC pulses to the top of the pot - too narrow for the audio to be affected. For example, say the pulse was 5 or 10 microseconds long, once every 50 miliseconds. The audio from the speaker should be unaffected even with a common power supply, yet a train of digital pulses would be available at the wiper. A difference in pulse amplitude would indicate that the pot has been moved. Get the pulses at the wiper, and adc to establish a level in a register in a micro. The micro can compare saved_level to current_level and if the delta is equal to or greater than a target, reset the timer. Wouldn't matter if the pot was moved up or down as the micro only cares about the delta between the new reading and the old reading.
You still need to be able to find the right connection points to the pot, whatever you try. It's probably worth trying to get schematics for all of the gear you might want to automute. If you can get at least some schematics, it'll save you some work and head scratching.
yes. I had drawn that modification in a schematic I was going to post and then just removed it because I figured calling attention to it would be enough and I hoped you'd say what I see you saying above. Because it makes complete sense to me (and I was able to figure it out on my own, which is a good thing.)
Got it.
Understood. That I can do, as well.
Yeah. So there is the pain. Finding that damned schematics for each case.
I had early posted the "wish" that this would be applied right at the speaker itself and drew its power from speaker drive power itself. The pair of speaker wires is pretty much universal. Of course, that's a whole other bag of worms. But after looking at this single unit, I'm wondering if it might be worth thinking a little more about.
Or just build my own amplifier system, for gosh sake! Then I _know_ what I'm doing and can make it work properly without all the hassle. Of course, I'll need a 'pick-off' point for the existing boxes and devices. Which _could_ be the speakers, though that isn't the usual point -- if I conditioned that before applying it to the amplifier chain.
Now why can't manufacturers just realize that an auto-mute function would be handy! I'd buy that.
Okay. That seems like the right direction even though it adds an external box that makes this more complex for her and us and takes up more space and adds yet another 'wire system' to trip over or break when she drags things around. Screw the auto-mute built into the boxes. I'll just work on the amplifier design (or select an easily modifiable system that includes case and power.)
Well, you could do it at the existing speaker(s) with an active rectifier to develop a DC level, but I can't figure out how to make it reliable, because audio level constantly changes without moving the volume control. So your idea of building an amp with automuting sounds best.
One other possibility, which depends on your life situation knowledge. A ten minute (or whatever) timer mutes the speaker AND turns on a mic & amp VOX circuit. The mic circuit would be off during the 10 minute period so that it won't detect sound from the equipment when it is not muted. If that circuit detects noise from her normal activity, it resets the timer and un-mutes. The noise from her normal activity is the key - if her activity to go to the equipment & turn the volume control can be detected that approach might work.
There is plenty of power when the volume is UP, which is when I most need muting after a delay. Other times it would work if it could stand out of the way and not mute, I suppose. Best is to have a consistent muting behavior, though. Higher power outputs (and we have some that are blasting away at 20-30 watts, maybe) mean fairly high drive voltages and passing and blocking those may not be straight-forward. In any case, deriving power for the circuit from the speaker output power only makes the whole thing seem even more outside my skills.
I think most of the stuff I have either has a headphone jack or else a line out (or both.) The line out wouldn't disable output, while the headphone jack usually does. Their signal levels and drive impedances are different, so each would need a slightly different 1st stage -- but I could arrange an either-or circuit for that (after I figure out what the signals are like.) The rest isn't hard and I don't need high fidelity or high power outputs. This doesn't have to be a 30-watt plastic tiger. A quasi-complimentary output and perhaps a diff-amp pair before it seems all that is necessary. I _do_ need to spend some time figuring out what phone jack and line outputs look like though. I am ignorant, there.
You are making me like the homebrew amplifier even more. ;)
This sounds like a very standard audio (log) taper dual element stereo=20 volume control. Most of the ones i have seen the physical elements are=20 stacked along the axis of the shaft.
Sounds like A and C are the "wipers" (output side). D and E are acting=20 strange though. Take measurements at half rotation as well. It should=20 help sort things
She loves watches and takes mine off and puts it back on, a lot. I've even seen her 'try' to consider the idea of putting it on her own arm. But only for a moment.
It took us many, many years just to get her to wear a t-shirt. As I think I already mentioned, she is very 'sensitive' to stuff that touches her. Most types of cloth are impossible and we have to carefully select textures and other factors. She still won't wear anything more than a long t-shirt and underpants, except in contained/controlled situations (such as driving in the car.)
A necklace or tiara is not probably not happening. But every idea may be worth a try.
Basically it is the electric potentials that can be measured in=20 correlation of muscle contraction. It is a well known interference=20 for ElectroEncephalaGrams (EEG).
Not much quality stuff on a quick Internet search:
I'll keep this topic in mind and discuss it with a neurologist and endocrinologist early next year (Feb.) I'm trying to get a project started with them and a few researchers up at UofW, anyway, on a different topic related to nano-encapsulation. So this sounds like something they can either inform me a little about or else refer me to someone they know who can do better. Sounds like something I'm not going to have an answer about right away, but might pay off to learn about at least. Thanks for the term. I'll run with it.
She wouldn't understand the concept... at least, not right away. She does 'get things,' though. We never know what she wants to spend time on until she shows us, so we continually supply different things to see what catches. There are some movies she seemed to like -- Roger Rabbit, for example. But often for movies, at first, it seems more about sounds and music and perhaps some basic actions. But after watching some movies maybe 50 or 100 times, she will start laughing at the right places or changing moods where others might, which tells me that over time the broad strokes in the movie begin to come across almost like they do with many 'normal' folks and she understands a lot more. But some things may take years. "A princess" feeling is something I suspect would take a very long time to instill.
Something I haven't mentioned is that in all her 25 years she has never reacted to physical pain -- severe or otherwise -- by crying or crying out like many will. She has accidentally pressed up on a searing hot piece of metal and sustained 3rd degree burns without us knowing, right away. She laughed and did things like always, the only difference we noticed being that she seemed to react a little more negatively to abrupt sounds, like a phone. Now, she has always freaked out with a phone ringing or a dog barking and so on. Noises that most of us accommodate, often even losing notice to us like that of a closing door, will send her reeling and freaking out. That is, if those sounds aren't under her control. But we can tell when she is a little _more_ like that than other times. And in this case, we noticed and started looking more closely at her for physical injury. Sure enough, there it was. She sees no reason to cry, no purpose -- she knows it doesn't change the pain and she doesn't understand that sometimes we can help. So she just grins and bears it. Very much, I imagine, as a great many creatures do in the wild. (A cat will often get an abscess that "blows out" their cheekside. But they don't complain, don't cry, don't moan. They move on. She is very much like that.
When she broke her radius and ulna in one grand mal seizure a year ago last October, and I discovered it as I helped her through the seizure, she woke up from the seizure that time quite quickly. But while I was totally screaming to my wife to find a 90-degree angled piece of Styrofoam in which to rest her broken arm, and going nuts trying to keep her from moving it in the meantime to mitigate muscle and tissue damage from grinding against the broken sharded ends of bone, she was just curious. She looked at her arm, tried to use it, found it odd, but never for a second showed the slightest signs of a grimace or crying or anything. Curiosity, almost. I got her packed up, taped, dressed and started taking her into the car to bring her to the closest emergency center 5-minutes away, and as she tried to use that arm to help me close the car door.
Now, I _know_ for a fact she feels pain and feels worse pain more. That comes from other observations. But she does NOT react to it, even of the most painful variety, except with an almost stoicism and a remarkable clarity of thinking about it. It's one of those things I keep marveling about, trying to grasp it more fully. It's a stand out thing about her.
She also _cares_ a great deal, about animals and people and things. If anything is damaged or fails to work, she brings it to me to fix. If an animal is hurt, she tries to get me to deal with it. If one of us is hurt, she carefully watches and will be far more sensitive to us than otherwise she might be.
Regarding the noises that disturb her and the fact that I earlier mentioned (or hinted) that ones she makes don't disturb her (as much, anyway), it's like that in all of us. Just very much heightened in her. For example, consider the idea of someone coming up behind you with a firecracker and setting it off without you knowing it. Your reaction is sudden and quite often filled first with fear and then quickly after with anger. Not everyone's reaction will be exactly the same and we do "learn" and "adapt" -- especially if this happens a lot to us. But if you aren't pre-conditioned, that event includes frustration, possible fear, and quite likely anger -- with anger perhaps taking a second or two to arrive in clear form. Now consider the idea that someone tells you first and instead of setting it off in back of you, they do it in front of you where you can see the fuse dwindle down. Let's say, same distances to your ears either way. In this case, you can mentally 'steel' yourself and the impact is far far less. We are able to "prepare" ourselves, and this preparation no doubt in my mind involves physical changes that our brain initiates in anticipation which helps to mitigate the event's necessary chain of triggers within our bodies... perhaps with the early release of COMT and MAO, though I'm not sure about exactly what mechanisms are in play. I just know they work.
She's like that, too. If she is the reason or cause, she is much better able to handle it. But if the sound is not in her control -- I close the door, she doesn't, for example -- then her reaction is strong... very strong.
On a more mundane note, we do this all the time with the closing of doors. When a door closes behind us, the sounds reach our cochlea and almost immediately, at a very low level, signals to the pituitary gland to trigger an adrenaline (epinephrine) release. This is measurable, by the way. Shortly later, higher functioning levels in the brain associate the sudden sound with a door closing and another signal arrives, triggering the release of digestive enzymes like COMT and MAO. Although there is a measurable pulse and decay, we learn to completely ignore the visceral responses over time. Yet they remain, while many of us almost completely subsume the event into near unconsciousness unless it is a particularly remarkable closing of a door.
Now imagine that she does NOT have this follow-on mechanism -- some part of it is broken. Every time I say something, it is a series of sounds... rata-tata-rata-da-da-da... that reach her ears and perhaps trigger epinephrine releases. Every time a phone rings... Every time a door closes... every time something sound-wise takes place that has a rapid attack (in the attack-decay sense) to it, she gets "hit" with adrenaline. But she has no mechanism for COMT/MAO enzyme triggers, so the decay is much, much slower to leave. And she is in a heightened state of anxiety that doesn't readily leave, so new "impacts" add and add.
Something I thought to add. I also do not respond to pains as many others do. Mostly, I think, because my responses are viscerally more analytical. A story illustrates.
We enjoy all wildlife and spend a lot of time in the woods just watching or studying animals in their behaviors, talking about what we observe, theorizing, and just plain loving the experiences. This got us to a point in our lives where we were doing "animal aid" volunteer work and for a time my wife and I became the contact point for 911 calls regarding "wild animals." I was responding to a wild raccoon call in a new housing development near a woods and trapped the _huge_ raccoon against a fence and house corner. I had on motorcycle leather gloves and had towels with me (very useful) and I managed to engage it and subdue it. (Raccoons, especially big ones, are very powerful. But a knee in their back with the weight of a human behind it completely sprawls them if applied craftily and well.) While wrapping it with the towels (much like a straight jacket idea), I made a mistake and allowed it's mouth to grasp my thumb. It's teeth went straight through the leather glove and deeply enough to fully engage its teeth right into some of my bones. It was quite painful.
However, I felt _no_ emotion whatsoever. Not immediately, not later. No anger at the animal, at all. (I never have.. it is something I simply lack.) I completely understood what it had done and why it had done it. It was no fault of the raccoon and my mind was _purely_ and _only_ working on the details I'd need to consider in order to mitigate damage to me and to finish the job at hand. I had no other emotions operating. None, at least, that I was aware of.
There have been many other such events in my life like that. We deal with animals and I'm not immune to injuries -- for example, I'm missing the tip of my right index finger from a chipper shredder event some years back and I've run another finger into a running saw (mostly okay, now.) A long life is not unlike that. But I remember this one in particular because it was the first time I realized that other people would likely feel anger towards an animal that attacked them. And I was in my 30's before it ever dawned on me that anyone could feel anger for that reason. Getting angry at an animal or inanimate object when injured seems irrational and illogical to me and makes no sense, whatsoever. And I certainly do NOT have any visceral (gut) reactions I know about in that regard. These kinds of things are simply "problems to solve" to me. Nothing more. Yes, I feel the pain. And yes I react to it! Just without the confounding emotions others seem to have.
It was afterwards, talking with others about the raccoon event, that they tried to empathize with me and talk about "boy, you must have been very angry." It was only in my own mystery about why they'd say so and in the ensuring questions I asked them and their own answers that it slowly began to dawn upon me that others would feel such emotions towards creatures and objects (like cupboard doors they bonked into at times.) I still find that a bit of a mystery, because I can't find it inside myself to understand it in a gut-way.
Now, for me, people are entirely a different thing. I can get quite upset at people doing terrible things to others, or me. Because I know they know better. And I believe I can feel very much like others about that. Visciousness, mean-spiritness, disingenuousness, climbing on the backs of others, and so on are very human behaviors I do get angry about and despise. It's just that I know a table or door isn't viscious and cannot be. Similarly, most animal behaviors as well. So there is nothing there to get angry at. And anger is a higher level brain function for me -- it requires analysis to feel. It _never_ occurs to me at a primal-response level, before higher functioning gets a chance to operate.
Which makes me wonder how much of her responses are like mine.
=46or inanimate objects i usually do not get angry with the object but=20 with myself. I typically know that the object is there, and thus=20 that it is reliably my fault. With animals it is more split, their objective is not (normally)=20 vicious, just self-defense. Still i am typically as frustrated=20 with them as i am with myself.
Make that they should know better. I have had to deal with too many = people=20 that quite willfully don't
I can get ticked even seeing it third party.
I will hazard an estimate that there is a clear genetic component. This, of course, enhances question about similarities with your spouse.
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