Jeep Project (Anti) Progress
Using the Copus concert at the Port of Wichita just last Wednesday as an excuse to come to El Dorado to visit my parents, I decided that I would double up on the getting-things-done ratio and spend the rest of the week here in El Dorado visiting the parents and, importantly, working on my Jeep.
The Mobile Bunker project has been a long time coming, with most of the money spent already and none of the actual labor put into the vehicle. These four days of dedicated were to change all that. Of course, I say were.
Because after all the work that I’ve put in in the last two days, I just spent–literally–ten solid hours trying to get the touchscreen controller that I purchase as part of the Touch LCD Kit that I purchased from EarthLCD. I couldn’t be more frustrated and less impressed.
It’s sick, just to start with, because I’ve already had the setup working, in it’s entirety, when I first purchased all of these components a little under a year ago. I just wanted to try all of them to make sure that they worked. And they did. But now that it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, I can’t do anything to get the integrated touch controller on the LCD controller card to generate one freaking bit of data to the computer’s eagerly awaiting serial port. I can’t begin to express my frustration as I suffer over this one component, hour after hour, trying to find anything that could be the problem.
I’ve installed every driver, reinstalled, and tried different versions of everything. Even expanding the attempts into realms that don’t even really apply. So while now the computer has all kinds of great manufacturer provided suped up drivers for the video card or whatever, still not a single thing from the COM port. Every iteration of service packs have been tried. There were sixteen pins arranged in two rows for a four pin plug, and just in case I was somehow mistaken when I aligned the arrow with the pin obviously labeled as 1, I went ahead and tried connecting the resistive touch screen to each of the 10 possible arrangements, then reversed the plug and went for the other 10 possible arrangements. (Of course, a multimeter confirmed that it was in the right spot in the first place anyway.)
I’ve been in and out of hyperterminal, just trying to get some kind of noise from the port, and nothing. Now I’m trying to find some way that I can get ahold of a serial mouse to try that, but I don’t really know where I’m going to find something like that without spending any money to try things. I’m going to drive over to my Mom’s house and pray that her mouse is a serial mouse so that I can do some more testing. Though if the serial mouse works, then I’m just screwed. And if it doesn’t work… well then I’m still screwed. So I’m not sure what good it’s going to do me. Other than let me know if my $300 motherboard is messed up or my $200 touch screen is messed up. Both of which are more money than I can handle right now.
If I can’t figure something out soon, I think I’m just going to say “the hell with it” and install it anyway. Then I can just take it back apart when I get home sometime and try to work on it some more, perhaps when I have some money to replace some components if anything is busted.
This had the potential to be a very productive weekend… it’s getting ruined quick.