Monday, January 10, 2011

Let the games begin: My own microcontroller kit

Woo, hoo! I'm excited.

I've had two opportunities in my career to work with embedded software directly. The first was in mid-80's when the company I was working for developed a Z80-based product. And then a couple years ago, I was able to play with an 8051 based development kit that I wrote about here and here.

I've had a passing interest in controlling things from my earliest days of leaning computers but have always been side tracked somewhat by the extra investment in hardware. Development kits have typically cost in the couple hundred dollar range and it's pretty easy to smoke them, so I've hesitated investing in anything. Recently I've become increasingly aware of the Arduino platform. I don't really know enough of all the details to write about them here, but basically it's an open source hardware/software platform for microcontroller development. Depending on features, they can be acquired for less than $10 on the low end to several tens of dollars on the high end. At this cost point, the high end is an order of magnitude cheaper than what I've seen most other development kits start at. This makes the thought of smoking something much more palatable. Destroying a $20 part because you hooked it up wrong is much easier to take than a $200 part.

So, when my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas this year, I had a ready answer: an Arduino starter kit. And she got me this one.

So far I am quite pleased with it. It has everything listed on the web page and things seem to work well. The only assembly needed is to attach the controller board (with screws) and a breadboard (with double sided adhesive) to a clear acrylic base. For anyone putting one together, I recommend putting the controller board on first and then the breadboard second. Since the controller is held on with machine screws, it can only go in one location, with no wiggle room. The adhesive on the breadboard is permanent. There is no ability to move it once placed, but its location isn't as critical as the controller. I put the breadboard on first and didn't leave myself as much room as would have been ideal for the controller board. It would have been easier to do it the other way around. That minor issue aside, everything else is ready to go out of the box.

There is a freely available IDE available that has to be downloaded from the internet. Once downloaded, there's no other internet requirement. The IDE is pretty bare bones. It provides a text editor and upload capability to the controller via USB. It has a window to allow serial communication with the controller if the software you've loaded on the controller is programmed to communicate with it. Don't expect modern conveniences like code completion, debugging and the like. It's not there. Although, since it's open source, I'm sure if you wanted to make a patch to do that, others would appreciate it. :-)

At this point, I have only experimented with some minor motor and LED control. One cool thing about the system is it has both digital I/O and analog input and PWM output baked into both the hardware and the software. Reading an analog signal is simply a matter of connecting it to one of the analog pins and in software doing something like "inValue = analogRead(0);" where inValue is a byte and the 0 is the pin number to read. The voltages on the pin can be from ground to +5V and the corresponding byte value will be 0 to 1024. Analog type output can be achieved with pulse width modulation. (I don't want to delve into the details of what this entails here. For more information on PWM, start here and here.) This is doesn't work for all devices, but for many that one would want to control with a microcontroller, like motors and LEDs, it works well. This is done with a simple "analogWrite(value);" where value is in the range 0 to 255, 0 being off, 255 being full on and anything in between be a linear intermediate value (e.g. 64 is 25% on, 127 is 50% on, 192 is 75% on).

I've got some things on order to play with and more ideas to experiment with than I know what to do with. Lots of things to learn and explore. It's so much fun to have a new toy.

4 comments:

Wholly said...

I've been messing around (in my mind) with doing some Arduino stuff, but I've also been looking at the Parallax Propeller. Both are amazing solutions to different problems.

Harley Pebley said...

Thanks Rob.

Yes, the Propeller is an interesting product. The clock sync between modules appears to be a novel idea. But in my admittedly limited searching, it has a much higher cost point than the Arduino and doesn't seem to have the large community behind it. And being a proprietary product, you have more issues of vendor lock-in, extendability issues, etc.

There are certainly an increasing number of options for micro-controller development.

Wholly said...

I agree - but I have to say that the plethora of arduino variations is also a barrier to entry. There are just too many choices. The community is quite helpful in choosing though.

It is great to have a wide range of choices for solutions. It is also a shame that the hobby market seems to be more welcoming of this technology compared to professional engineers.

Ever check out element14.com?

Harley Pebley said...

I hadn't seen element14.com. Looks interesting. Thanks for the link.