Wipe Generator

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I had some time today as I’m waiting on parts to arrive and an OMF to cut. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad time to try my best at making the wipe generator work. It’s a box that takes your video signal for the booth and adds a white bar that streams across it. It allows you to cue people visually. People are all different and everyone takes a cue differently. I wanted to get this thing working and have another option to offer if someone can’t catch a rhythm from beeps.

The box was out of use because:

A) the company that produced it has long closed shop (so no info on it could be gotten)

B) it required a contact closure to be triggered as opposed to something like tone or midi controls

The best solution was to find some type of circuit that could translate a tone pop to a contact closure or trigger. Enter the optocoupler, an integrated circuit utilizing an LED and a phototransistor. The light takes the tone pop’s voltage (which needed to be increased +19db to actually fire it) and changes it from an analog signal, to light which is emitted onto a phototransistor, and changed into a logic signal.

After protoboarding it with some Cat5e cable and getting it to finally fire with a 9v battery.  I put it all in a project box and packed it into the rack.