What is I/O Expander? Input and output pins are very precious resources in small digital projects these days. Popular small micro controllers like the PIC, 8051, SX, BASIC Stamp, etc., may only have 8-to-16 lines of I/O available for use, while we typically have a need to drive LCD displays, LEDs and frequency synthesizers; and read A/D converters, keyboards, shaft encoders and more. Hardware interfacing is the name of the game, and you can never have too much I/O capability on a processor to handle all these tasks. Well, here’s a relatively simple project called the I/O Expander, or IOX for short, that will greatly ease that I/O pin crunch on your current micro controller project. At first it looks like a clone of the common “serial LCD” controller – but when you look under the hood, you’ll see an I/O processor that’s chock full of goodies that we use everyday in our ham applications: serial display driver, frequency counting, A/D conversion, keypad processing and digital potentiometer control.
Outer Barcoo – What's Calling You?® I/O Expander Expand I/O capabilities of small homebrew projects with"IOX" .. an I/O Expander Serial LCD + Frequency Counter + driver for A/D Converter, Keypad and Digital Potentiometer IOX SOURCE CODE | HOST SOURCE CODE (EXAMPLE) | Photo of IOX on Eval Board The IOX chip works great with the QuickieLab project board OVERVIEW The I/O Expander is a 28-pin SX microcontroller that is programmed to operate as a slave I/O processor to a host controller in your projects. DESCRIPTIONInput and output pins are very precious resources in small digital projects these days. Well, here’s a relatively simple project called the I/O Expander, or IOX for short, that will greatly ease that I/O pin crunch on your current microcontroller project. A Ubicom SX-28 is programmed to be controlled by the host microcontroller of your project using a standard asynchronous serial port running at 2400 baud, thus acting as the host’s “henchman” in performing various I/O functions. Figure 1: Block Diagram of I/O Expander in a System
Cigar Box Project The Cigar Box Project was a year-long, Canadian History project embedded in inquiry-based, 1:1 classroom. The Cigar Box Project has won two national teaching awards, and has been presented, locally and internationally. In doing the project, students lived the disciplines of historical thinking, information literacy and graphic design as they used 21st Century tools to reinterpret events from Canadian History. Through an iterative, remixing process powered by peer evaluation and multiple feedback loops, students remixed historical images to create five historical Cigar Box panels and three historical iMovies, each one supported by rigorous research and the help of a number of experts along the way. In the second year of the project, students used online tools to work collaboratively with students in another school division. You can read all my posts on the Cigar Box Project by clicking here.
chipKIT from Microchip - Developed for the Ardu... All Places > Design Center > Documents The chipKIT™ platform is an intuitive prototyping solution that enables students, educators and hobbyists from a variety of disciplines to introduce intelligent electronics into their project without understanding microcontroller (MCU) architecture. Whether new to embedded systems or looking to upgrade exisitng Arduino-based projects, users can now enjoy the increased performance, added memory space and advanced peripherals. Products Back to Top Discussions Back to Top Average User Rating (0 ratings) 0 Comments Login or Register to comment There are no comments on this document. Are you sure you want to delete this document? Share Related Products Currently Being Moderated Close PreviousNext PreviousMaximize Next
Non-blocking Operations on Arduino | www.quilix.com No stinkin' library needed.... I'm using the term 'blocking' a little loosely here. In Arduino-land... I'm talking about delay(). // ... from the Arduino Blink Sketchvoid loop() { digitalWrite( led, HIGH ); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level) delay( 1000 ); // wait for a second digitalWrite( led, LOW ); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW delay( 1000 ); // wait for a second} "While it is easy to create a blinking LED with the delay() function, and many sketches use short delays for such tasks as switch debouncing, the use of delay() in a sketch has significant drawbacks. If you're new to Arduino, you might not realize just how badly delays can impact performance. If you need more mileage... structs + PROGMEM can be used to expand this approach to cover dozens of specialized operations without eating-up precious kilobytes.
Microcontroller Basics - Introduction | Homemade Circuit Designs Just for You One thing is great about microcontroller ICs, these are available almost in all parts of the globe and electronic retailers. Fundamentally microcontroller devices are popularly used in applications involving assessments of the surrounding environment and in similar electronics. You could find these devices being used for displaying a certain parameter, in motor control applications, LED lighting, sensors of various types such tilt sensor, accelerometer, velocity meter, data loggers, temperature controllers, keyboards etc. The primary understanding regarding microcontrollers could be obtained by referring to AVR Amega32 microcontroller which is so advanced that sometimes it’s called a computer within a chip. This device is assigned to carry out series of commands to form a program. The language of the program that you would be seeing here is C++. When it comes to MCUs, you get the facility of having the option of controlling and configuring all of its pinouts.
List of 39 Low Cost Linux Friendly Boards and Products Dmitry (omgfire), one of my awesome readers, compiled a great tabular list of Linux friendly boards and products that sells for less than $300 US (usually less than $200). This list includes technical details such as the processor, GPU, memory, NAND flash, connectivity, ports, supported Linux distributions… as well as availability and pricing information. There are currently 39 Linux devices in total. The vast majority are ARM based boards, but he also included 2 x86 products by VIA, but those are relatively pricey ($265 and up). Here’s a summary list with SoCs used, links to blog posts and product pages (if available), as well as price information. Raspberry Pi Board Model B Beaglebone Snowball PDK Lite The list is obviously not exhaustive (this would include hundreds of boards), but this still pretty good. You can download Dmitry’s PDF file that shows side-by-side comparison of 5 devices at a time.
USB + Serial Backpack Kit with 16x2 RGB backlight negative LCD [RGB on Black] ID: 784 - $24.95 : Adafruit Industries Adding a character display to your project or computer has never been easier with the new Adafruit USB or TTL serial backpack! This custom-designed PCB sits on the back of our 'standard' character LCD (16x2 or 20x4 sized) and does everything you could want: printing text, automatic scrolling, setting the backlight, adjusting contrast, making custom characters, turning on and off the cursor, etc. It can even handle our RGB backlight LCDs with full 8-bit PWM control of the backlight. That means you can change the background color to anything you want - red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse, or just leave it off for a neutral background. Inside the backpack is an USB-capable AT90USB162 chip that listens for commands both a mini-B USB port and a TTL serial input wire. The USB interface shows up as a COM/serial port on Windows/Mac/Linux. We have a full tutorial, including diagrams, testing instructions, and more!
Dangerous Prototypes | A new open source hardware project every month FTDI Basic Breakout - 5V Description: This is the newest revision of our FTDI Basic. We now use a SMD 6-pin header on the bottom, which makes it smaller and more compact. Functionality has remained the same. This is a basic breakout board for the FTDI FT232RL USB to serial IC. The pinout of this board matches the FTDI cable to work with official Arduino and cloned 5V Arduino boards. It can also be used for general serial applications. The pins labeled BLK and GRN correspond to the colored wires on the FTDI cable. This board has TX and RX LEDs that make it a bit better to use over the FTDI cable. This board was designed to decrease the cost of Arduino development and increase ease of use (the auto-reset feature rocks!). One of the nice features of this board is a jumper on the back of the board that allows the board to be configured to either 3.3V or 5V (both power output and IO level). Documents:
Arduino Arduino is an open-source computer hardware and software company, project and user community that designs and manufactures kits for building digital devices and interactive objects that can sense and control the physical world.[1] Arduino boards may be purchased preassembled, or as do-it-yourself kits; at the same time, the hardware design information is available for those who would like to assemble an Arduino from scratch. The first Arduino was introduced in 2005. The project leaders sought to provide an inexpensive and easy way for hobbyists, students, and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators. Common examples for beginner hobbyists include simple robots, thermostats and motion detectors. Adafruit Industries estimated in mid-2011 that over 300,000 official Arduinos had been commercially produced,[3] and in 2013 that 700,000 official boards were in users' hands.[4] History[edit] Hardware[edit] Official boards[edit] Shields[edit]
Arduino and DS18B20 - 1-wire digital thermometer | Ogalik Finally got this DS18B20 working. Actually three of them. And in two modes. Parasite power mode and main mode. A 4.7K ohm resistor is the key. Starting with the main mode, three wires are needed, as this sensor has three pins. Works with three wires, as seen on the following illustration. Parasite mode eliminates one wire. Maybe following illustration helps. Of course multiple DS18B20-s or different one wire devices can connected together like so: Here comes the beauty of using digital thermometers. Some words of caution: No pins on DS18B20 should be left unconnected. Software? DS18B20 can also be installed outside. Working with three DS18B20 thermometers for a year now – sometimes those thermometers do not get initialized correctly. Related posts: