Hello all.

I am (really) still working on my upgrade board for the empeg, when I get time. I've been horrendously busy developing some cute hardware for a company that pays me quite well, for the last 9 months, so that's the main reason it hasn't appeared yet. It will happen, though, I promise. (you may even see the hardware I've been working on, which I guarantee would interest everyone on this board)

However, while we're waiting , I had an idea. I was looking over the display board schematics the other day, and thought to myself, "I could design an automatic dimmer circuit for this, you know. I wonder if anyone would be interested?"

So. There's the question. Would any of you Mk1 owners be interested in some form of dimmer addon for the display? The simplest form would be a small PCB that could be added to the back of the display board, with three pots on it. One would set the light-activated dim threshold, one would set the brightness for nighttime, and one would set the brightness for daytime.

It would be possible to make this semi-intelligent, with a PIC controlling it, but the complexity goes up, and there is the problem of how to interface it to the outside world (or empeg CPU), so I think the first method is better. After all, once it's set, how often would you want to change it?

At a quick estimate, I'd need to charge about $35 or so for the kit, and would have to have at least 25 people buy one to make it worthwhile getting the PCBs made. The board would have to be surface mount construction, to get it to fit, but I'd go easy on you poor non-smt builders and use those big chunky 3.2mm size 1206 components, not the 0.5mm 0403 size ones I've been spending the last week hand-soldering in appalling quantities

I could probably offer a built unit as well, for a bit more, but either case would require a little soldering to the back of the display board, and two resistors removed.

Any takers?

pca

( I have a few other ideas for add-on boards. If this one shows that anyone at all is interested, I will think about making some of the others.)


Opinions expressed in this email may contain up to 42% water by weight, and are mine. All mine.