What are the best settings to de-bounce a switch input?

[mcastrigno]

What I am triggering is a button in the QLC+ software. I have created a virtual console. The physical setup is an interactive display inside a children's hospital. There are large pushbuttons that small children can press and when they do, a section of LEDs lights up on a model of Idaho. When pressed, a positive voltage is applied to the inputs of the ORION. The display stopped working about a year and half ago. The vendor that created the display is no longer in business and we have no contact information for the original creators. I am a software engineer working at the hospital. However, I also have an electrical engineering degree so I was asked to see if I can fix this display. The display had a PC inside running custom software to control the display. That PC had a massive disk failure, and the original program was lost. I am attempting to recreate the functionality using QLC+. I have created a virtual console in QLC+. This console has buttons. The buttons are a "toggle" function. The software is configured to monitor packets from the ORION. When it sends two packets instead of one packet, when the button is pressed it turns off the button immediately after turning it on.

I am sure I am not the only one that has a use case to detect a button press that does not look like a random number of presses. The slope detection function of the ORION would seem logical to send only one packet when the slope is detected but apparently that is not the case.

How can I determine what the sample rate will be? I can try to add additional circuitry to modify the signal of the button press to accommodate the limitations of the ORION so it will only see the voltage for one sample which would hopefully result in only on packet being sent.

This message board only allow photos that have public urls in URLS. I have no such resource otherwise I would share photos

[Schulze]

Hi mcastrigno,

Thank you for the detailed explanation.

As my colleague wrote DMX512 and thus Art-Net or sACN won't allow that, as it is a constant stream of data unlike MIDI for example (with MIDI data is only sent if something changes). If you trigger something with the ORION the defined value will be sent, otherwise it is constantly sending value 0 (or the lower defined value). This is also what happens in your case, I guess the buttons are "push buttons", right? So if you press the button to trigger, the defined value will be sent from the ORION, but once you release a 0 will be sent.

Therefore I assume that you need to change the interpretation of the values in the QLC+ software. Unfortunately I'm not quite familiar with it. With MADRIX 5 you have quite a few options to work around this, but I'm not sure if this is the case for QLC+.

Please send us the images to info[at]madrix[dot]com. Thanks in advance!

[mcastrigno]

Yes, I understand a constant stream of messages are sent. That is not a problem. What I am attempting to accomplish is for only one message to have the value associated with button press be sent. In order to do that I need the sampling rate at the input of the Orion. I can build a conditioning circuit so that no matter how long the button is held, the input to the Orion is a pulse width that with only result in one packet being sent that corresponds to the button being pressed but I need to know the sampling rate of the Orion.

I am attempting to repair a display that is in a not-for-profit children's hospital. This is outside my normal job function as a software engineer. There is no budget for the purchase of propriety software and the Madrix software is missing features I need to complete the function of the interactive children's display.

[Schulze]

Hi mcastrigno,

The sampling rate is 2 ms for the MADRIX ORION.

I hope this helps you!