superg wrote:
Cooperd9 wrote:
Sorry if this has already been asked, but google isn't giving me any useful results (although I'm probably just searching the wrong terms).
In my current setup, I have a gscartsw 5.2 with a bunch of RGB consoles and a raspberry pi running retropie for kodi and arcade stuff that isn't practical for me to run on real hardware connected to the inputs and an rgb modded NTSC crt and an OSSC connected to the outputs. Before I connected the pi, everything worked great, but the pi is causing problems for me. I would prefer to leave the pi always powered on because its lack of a physical power switch means I have to physically disconnect and reconnect the delicate little micro usb cable every time I want to power it on, however if I do that it always outputs a signal and the gscartsw won't display any consoles that I power on when the pi is powered on first. Is there a way to set this up so that the signal from the pi will only be output from the gscartsw when no other input devices are on and if I power on any devices while the pi is being output it will switch to the other device? This is likely relevant to users of other devices which always output a signal, I've heard some transcoders might do that as well.
Unfortunately no easy solution for this. Raspberry Pi was designed to be always on and as you probably figured out, it's always outputting sync on your SCART connector. You can either try to find a way to disable that in software (retropie perhaps?) or try to find a MicroUSB breakout cable with the on/off switch, I've definitely seen those somewhere.
That is unfortunate, thanks for responding anyways. I guess now I have to figure out the cleanest way to get one of those set up. It looks like it would be really easy if I don't mind having a loose bare pcb dangling around with buttons on it, but if I want something clean it would be trickier, but there may be an option that solders directly to gpio, which I don't need since I am using HDMI->vga and then a custom vga->scart cable with a passive sync combiner built in, although I would then have to cut a hole in my case and have a power cable sticking diagonally out the corner.
If I can't find anything sufficiently clean for my tastes I guess I could also look through any documentation you have on the EXT port to see if there is enough info there that I could program an arduino nano or if I get really dedicated to this a PIC and an adapter board to force the behavior I want since I could at least stick that inside a bumper case and not have loose cables hanging around. A quick google search isn't showing that anyone else has done that yet. As far as the documentation for EXT is concerned, all I found so far is this
superg wrote:
gscartsw_lite EXT pinout:
Pin 1: GND
Pin 2: Override
Pin 3: N/C
Pin 4: +5V
Pin 5: IN_BIT0
Pin 6: IN_BIT1
Pin 7: IN_BIT2
Pin 8: N/C
Pin 5-7 represents selected input in binary.
There isn't a whole lot there, but based on the features page of your store and what you have, it sounds like in the default state pin 4/5/6 will report whatever input is currently selected as a binary number and if I were to have an external output device output voltage on pin 2 (or short it to ground, I would have to check what its default behavior is with a multimeter) then 4/5/6 would act as an input and the gscartsw would read those pins as a binary number and select the corresponding input. That would be enough info to set up a remote or something to force a specific input if you already know what you want to override with (IE pressing 8 on a remote to force the switch to select input

, but doesn't sound like it is quite enough for what I want to do, I would need to query for all currently active inputs. If I could do that, I should be able to code that would always override with the lowest numbered input when more than one are detected. Maybe in future hardware revisions the ext can be extended to support that or maybe that behavior can be built into new hardware (or firmware) revisions, but I don't have that much experience with hardware design, I'm just a programmer that can solder some basic stuff together if I have decent instructions.