Wel at first place. mi name is Mauricio i'm from Brazil....... i bougth two VU meter .. and i will like to know if somebody can help me . to conect theese guys into a P2 conector and after to my PC mod... .... There are some Photos.. excuse me for the low quality of the pictures... it´s from the cellphone... Any Other Ideas can be posted... Thanks !
Can you please clarify exactly what it is you want them to display? What exactly do you mean by "p2 connector". I am quite sure we can help, if we can figure out what it is you are wanting to do Oh and welcome to the forums
If you want to display the vu from the sound card you need to add a set off connectors and wirt the meters between them.
Depending on whether the VU meters have an internal rectifier in them (it looks like it does not), you either need a simple potentiometer in series with the meter, or a potentiometer and diode in series with the meter. It's all pretty simple, a simple electronics primer should tell you all you need to know, or get some better pictures and post them here. There are other way to make the meter more precise, but they're a good deal more involved.
when i was using some of these all i needed was a pot and a diode like wolfe said. the diode stops the arm from going backwards.
Actually, the diode prevents the needle from not moving at all. If you have it backwards, the needle moves the other direction. audio is AC, and it's all above 20 hz. At that frequency, the needle can't move fast enough to keep up with the signal, and the end result is either nothing, or the needle vibrates a bit. Actually, if you put a big enough signal straight into the meter, it would probably act as a (albeit low quality) speaker....
well theres a example of me getting things wrong again. i just thought that the diode only let the current flow in one direction and thats what caused the needle from moving in 1 direction. but thats not right. so how does it work?
if you use a diode, remember a standard SI diode has a voltage drop around .7 v, meaning you are going to need a powered sound card output in order to drive those meters. if you have a line-level sound card, you are going to need an amplifier board made, either with op-amps, or etc... then your going to need a small RC time constant after the diode so you can actually "see" peak sounds. for meter accuracy, run a full-bridge rectifier instead of the single diode half-wave.
For an accurate meter, you can build a "perfect" (zero-loss) rectifier with the diode in the feedback loop of an unity-gain opamp. But in the case of these meters, too many unknowns, best bet is put a pot and diode in series and test as said, take it from there. Search the forum, I'm sure I remember other threads on analogue vu-meters.
Well . i understand a little bit of yours explanatiosn... but isn't enough.. i wass hoping for an circuit... like an example.. or a tested circuit... or a drawing.....;... hope you understand my english ...
