Well that was annoying. Chrome has developed an excessively annoying habit of randomly closing a tab when I open a new one. Which when you've just written a bunch of content is immensely frustrating.
Turns out that our new dog excellent taste in entertainment. I've had the TV on in the background most of the time when I've been looking after him or doing training work downstairs. Just as background noise really, both for the sake of my own sanity and because working around distractions is important. Most things have been totally ignored, but the one thing he's been pretty consistently transfixed by during down time has been Dr. Who.
It's been forever since I've seen a lot of it so I'm using this as an excuse to go back through from the start. I can't really do anything or have anything like my usual technical videos on YouTube that I actually want to pay attention to on, as I'm keeping tabs on a small puppy piranha. So it's a good fit.
In other news another box for the pinball machine arrived this morning. Another expansion board giving me an additional sixteen outputs (and I think eight inputs).
I knew without this I had precisely enough outputs for the chimes, but that was it. If I wanted to add anything else in the future I would be stuck. So I figured let's just future proof things. I would also have had to shuffle things a bit as the chimes require a high power output and not all channels are equal. Just sticking them on three high power channels on this board would be far simpler.
I actually had a spare hour this afternoon so got that all installed and set up.
Wiring needs to be tidied up and integrated into the loom but I just didn't have that much time today - and I'll probably wait to do that until I've got the bells ready to go in as well.
Spot the deliberate mistake I made prepping the chime unit for installation - adding the commutation diodes to the coils.
Yeah, I totally failed to remember that literally everything on the table has the ground side switched and the common being the positive. Derp. So yeah, those had to be de-soldered and flipped around. I realised literally the second I got the third one installed...only took five minutes to sort, but felt like a really rookie mistake.
These are actually 24V coils but we're only using 12V here. They're still plenty powerful enough even running on 12V it turns out, especially in a domestic setting where you're not trying to bash out enough volume to be heard in a noisy arcade.
As expected, it sounds *immensely* better than the synthesised chimes we had beforehand.
A bit like having a newborn baby in the house!
