As for making the display animate, the easiest setup that comes to mind is to get an Arduino microcontroller, and have it drive a TPIC6B595 high current shift register for each segment of the display. Of course this isn't something you can just wire up easily. Have to know the voltage of the display, measure how much current the bulbs draw, compare that with how much current the shift register can handle to see if it will be okay, etc. I'd also look to see if there were any chips specifically made for driving seven segment displays which could handle the kind of current incandescent bulbs need. It would be a lot easier to drive leds. Anyway, once you've got the right chips connected to the arduino, it would be a fairly simple program to write if all you wanted it to do was count up when power was applied. I was thinking you wanted something more, like wiring it up to the actual control stick on the remote to control the speed readout, or even sound.
Perhaps easy for someone familiar enough with programming. But I'm MUCH more familiar with a soldering iron. And yes, what you mentioned is *exactly* what I'm looking for: for the count to start at 0.0 when turned on, increase as the joystick is pushed, and the readout to cap at 88.0 when the joystick is in the full "up" position.
The problem I have run into is the workable range for the joystick potentiometer from full up to full down is only a difference of 750 ohms (and remember, Doc only uses *half* that. He starts from the *center* position of the joystick)
At full down, the pot reads 1.98K; at full up, it reads 2.73K
Needing to divide the 750ohm diff. into 88 separate values for reading input gets my circuits into trouble. And that is *assuming* that the pot isn't noisy due to age, and that it outputs different values at each point along its journey.
Swift, some people don't speak microcontroller, I think that at the point in the conversation where that is mentioned, is when us hardware guys lose interest and the thread dies. For as much as the Doc Brown remote threads have been helpful for sharing sources of parts like STOP lights, switches boxes, labels, etc., who and where are the people being generous sharing code? My peeve with these threads is that half the links are now dead, and half the pictures are missing.
It'd be nice if in the 6 years since these threads started, we'd be further along than we are.
Regards,
David M.
aka McFlyDallas
