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Joined: Nov 2018
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Bigmacx Offline OP
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Our school has a Dukane MCS350 mounted on the wall. The computer portion has apparently failed and I'm wondering how hard it would be to connect a Raspberry PI to the analog portion and just output sound that way. I'm good with the PI interfacing and programming but need to know more about the 2-wire card in there.

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I think we can just disconnect everything but the PS, Amp, 2-wire card, and speakers, then use the PI as the controller and sound input. The 2-wire card doesn't really seem that complicated with only a couple of connectors. Does anyone know where I can get more board-level diagram of at least the pinout descriptions for these connectors? It seems the dense 40pin'ish connectors select which speaker to output to and then a master audio input is fed into the board. I don't have manuals

Way I figure, it wouldn't be too hard to make the PI control the 2-Wire board if I knew more about those connectors. Any direct help would be great or even a push in the right direction would be appreciated. We're trying to use the existing premise wiring and such without buying a new system.

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The speakers are all on a common bus when in the "off" position. The program relay keeps the amp disconnected from the speaker circuits when idle. You could bypass the program relay on each card and feed the 25V audio in that way. You won't be able to dial individual rooms or recoeve calls but you'd at least have audio out to each circuit.

To get individual rooms is way more complicated and require interfacing with the big ribbon cable on the front of the card. 4 of the pins are for board selector, the others are for circuit selector. But that's about the extent of my knowledge on it.

Are you trying to complete replace the MCS digital card with the Pi, that it to say, handle all of the system functions, the classroom callins, run the bell schedules with zones, master clock, get the ACCs working again etc..., or are you just trying to get audio to come out of it on an all call basis??

We have parts for this system that we could get to you to save you the trouble of reinventing the wheel. Click on the logo in my signature for more info.

Good luck!

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Bigmacx Offline OP
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Highest priority is to get the bell schedule working, so that just needs an ability to send out sounds. Secondary is for overhead announcement from a person at a single physical location, but that's easy once #1 is working. Frankly, this system was only ever used for those 2 functions and from what we've been quoted by the vendor, replacements for these card is prohibitively expensive. I don't even know which one is bad. There are ones for sale on eBay depending on what's needed. We're not ready to spend a lot and there's a crossover pricepoint of fixing this vs waiting to buy a drop-in current model that keeps the speakers/wires.

We do have the PI's and misc digital type resources on hand here to make small kinds of interfaces. I bet the circuit selector for individual rooms is just some TTL encoding on those 40pins. 16 channels would need either 16 discrete input selectors or some form of 4-bit binary. Since in the original design I believe multiple speakers could be activated, I bet the 40pin has 16 discrete lines somewhere with one tied to each of the 16 channels. The board seems easy enough to trace to the buffering IC's and reverse engineer the encoding just from that. Thought maybe someone here had a technical drawing or diagram of this card that might be helpful

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Will someone tell me what these switches do? I there a table of options you could post? I don't have any documentation with our system. Thanks

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Tim10 will have your answer.

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ACC switch = binary representation to the system of how many ACC consoles are connected to the system (1-4)
SW CARDS switch = binary representation to the system of how many switch cards are connected to the system (1-16)
OPTIONS = doesn't do much, I think one changes the RS-232 port from DCE to DTE, and the other was for a pocket pager interface that was never developed.
RESET = resets system, power cycles ACC consoles
STATUS = changes operation of LED indicators LD1-8 on board. In one position, it will show the communication between the ACC's and the digital card. In the other, it will display a binary representation of system errors.


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