using PIC to act as button push

Easily done.

But a little more information please.

Does one side of each switch go to ground ?

How many buttons are there ?

Is this "little device" publicly available ??

donald

Cool...

Yes, I think so. One side of each switch is connected to the same trace which ends up in a place known as Vss. The other side of each switch goes to a place underneath the epoxy, it would appear each to a different place. I checked the resistance between the common switch traces and the negative terminal of the battery clip and there was virtually no resistance.

There are 3 buttons.

Publicly available, yes, but no schematics or circuit diagrams or anything like that.

Tx,

George

I see, so that when the output pin is off, the switch is open (that means button not pushed, right?), and when the output pin is on, then that pushes the button? Is that the idea?

Tx,

George

Right... I was wondering if you were going to ask.

I'm practicing on this:

And I eventually want to make it work on this:

It sounds easy, I'll give it a shot, and post back tomorrow, let you all know of my success or failure.

Tx,

George

You know, now that I'm at it, I just imagined that getting my PIC to output IR inside an enclosure to the IR input of the 2nd device would be more of a pain than just manipulating the buttons.

BUT, perhaps in the long run, assembly might be a lot easier, because there would be no buttons to remove from the PCB. Just connect, glue and go.

If the level of difficulty of "pushing the buttons" is 1 on a scale of

1) Decode the output of the original device's IR

There's probably more, but I thought those were the major milestones.

What would that difficulty level be? And how hard would it be to find somebody who could do it?

Tx,

George

Yes, thats it. But "ON" mean logic LOW and "OFF" means logic HIGH.

So tell us:

What is it ??

donald

I don't know the answer, but I do know that usually you start at 5, not one, in case IR would be easier. :-)

Oh Danny-Boy, the pipes, the pipes are callin' :-)

Although I just could not imagine it being so, POINT TAKEN! You are so right!

Tx,

George

Yes, I do realize that, I would imagine because of their debouncing routines, I will need to wait it out...

Still, if that is 50 milliseconds ON to recognize a button press, and say 50 to establish the OFF, that's 5 chars per second, plus a the 3 second wait, is about 5 seconds to establish and display the messages I want to display.

I remember from my IBM-PC days that can seem like an eternity.

I will have to get the IR kit and see if those times can be improved upon.

Tx,

George

OK, now that we know what the target is.

Do you understand that the "ON" state will need to be low for many milliseconds, and "OFF" for many milliseconds before you "press" the next button ??

The speed of each key press will be many times slower than the PIC runs.

donald

With the PIC ground and the pcb ground connected you can probably just connect the output of the PIC to ungrounded trace that goes to the pushbutton.

-- Dan Hollands

So, if I understand this new specification:

The first display will send a command to the slave display, maybe to sync the displays together.

Or are you thinking of replacing the "PC to IR Programming kit" ??

donald

Thanks Rob,

You are correct. That would be a better design.

But he would running the PIC from the same battery as the display. So it should not really matter.

donald

I'm not sure about this, but it may be useful to have on="output low" and off="pin set as input". That way the buttons can still be used without them having to forcibly pull the pic out hi level down. rob