Multiple boards in to one

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
The idea for putting all of the functions on one board makes a lot of sense, but even just having a four-way HDMI selector with a double output is a rather complex arrangement . That HDMI connection has a whole lot of very closely spaced connections, and even if you had the circuit to do the switching already designed it would be a serious effort to create the circuit board pattern for it.
The HDMI signal splitter part of the circuit is still a fairly complex piece of circuit board artwork, as well.

So my idea would be to not produce a single board for all of the functions, nor to produce a back plane with all of the interconnections, but rather to just put the power control and distribution on a main board and create much more compact interconnect cables for the various connections. The power distribution and controls will be the less complex portion of the circuit, as well as the interface between the PI and the LED control portion of the system.
This will allow the boards to be replaced if any fail and the whole assembly can be more compact.

Another option, which would certainly be a huge change, would be to use NTSC video instead of HDMI video. That would make the switching very simple, and eliminate the converter in front of the frame grabber. It might even be that the Pi could use the NTSC format signal directly. This is just an idea, it may not be a good one.
 
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Thread Starter

Jimmy Falk

Joined Sep 19, 2018
17
Thanks for all the feedback going to rethink this a bit and post what I came up with going to take everything in and reconsider my options now that I think about it
 
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