Hi Everyone,
I've been working on a digital pinball cabinet over the past few months with my dad, it's been a great project and lots of fun.
I've hit a bit of a stumbling block however and I was hoping to get some advice from the community here about whether I should proceed or not.
The cabinet has a PC and three displays, two of which are TCL LCD TV's (great price). The TV's do not have a dedicated standby switch, they have a single button which takes sequences of inputs to do things like volume, brightness etc.
I managed to isolate the pins on the TV board that activate this menu and even managed to use an arduino and a relay board to short these pins in the right sequence to turn them and the PC on at the same time, the issue I'm having now is that sometimes when you turn on the power at the wall the TV's will boot straight into full power rather than standby and it's making for some temperamental power on situations.
I know that I could use the Power LED pins on the motherboard of the PC and likewise on the TV boards to do a digital read on them and only turn on the devices that need to be turned on, but I'm not sure I should. The reason I opted for using a relay board was that I didn't want to create a shared circuit between the devices, instinctively this felt very risky to me. Am I right in this, or am I being overly cautious?
Thank you for reading.