Well, I’ve done it! Completed the fitting of the sockets this morning just before noon. I wasn’t impressed by the sockets, firstly putting them side by side they wouldn’t fit on the board together, so I had to file them down a bit, second problem was solder refused to stick to the pins on some of the sockets, so I had to give the pins a scrub with the fibreglass pencil too. Once all that was done I got the FPGA’s fitted, pulled a suitable telly off the shelves (Ekco TMB272, thought it’d make a change from all the Sony TV9-90’s’), and got ready to plug in the first one, I also set up a camera to record the event
In went the plug, nothing went bang, but then not a lot of anything else happened either, after a fiddle with the switches up popped the Hedghog test card! Complete with ‘Hedghog standards converter’ scrolling in the box at the bottom, neat touch, I like that! Connected a Sumvision SD card video player to the input and switched over, and up came the menu screen for that, played back some videos and had a play with some of the options, it all seems to be working!
I disconnected it and repeated the above with the second one, which also works too, I’ve got V2 firmware on this one. This one did some funny things with the test tone when I plugged in the video player, it sort of went up in volume, then faded back down, but other than that it’s working fine.
I did notice the vertical jittering on the test card on the first Hedghog, the one with the latest FW, which was not present on normal video, didn’t notice it on the second one, but I’ll have to check again to be sure. The TMB272 didn’t like the equalising pulses, they make the picture drop down about an inch.
I’m not quite at the end of the road with these yet, both boards could do with a wash, as they are a bit sticky with flux, and I’ve still got the front and rear panels to finish. This has certainly been one of the best projects I’ve built, so many thanks to Frank for making it possible. I’m sure there will be many more years of enjoyment to come from these yet!
Regards
Lloyd