Slight change in direction...
In the last year or two, clones of the Arduino UNO R3 and NANO boards have appeared on eBay and similar, selling for just a few dollars, and usually with free shipping. We have no interest at the moment in learning the Arduino language and associated programming software (such as libraries), but as these boards are very cheap and use standard Atmel chips, we bought a few of each to have a play with. They can be coded just as easily with the tools mentioned earlier, but with several advantages over the earlier methods:
> No need to make a board from scratch, at most a sub-board will be needed (if you are interfacing to higher than 5V and/or 20mA)
> Inbuilt USB communications port. This makes bug finding a lot easier (what's going on inside the chip can be displayed on the PC screen)
> The inbuilt USB communications port also makes it super easy to add PC control to a project
> Cost. The whole board can be bought, complete and assembled with connectors, voltage regulators, and 2 crystals - for less than it costs to post a bare unloaded board!
There were also a couple of minor disadvantages:
> The clones are largely undocumented and in one case had a wrong IC fitted to the board
> Limited range of baud speeds available, because the AVR chip is clocked with an external crystal in order to achieve the highest performance possible
Easy to overcome these limitations... the designs were simple to reverse-engineer and make drawings for, and a terminal program was written especially for these boards. It only allows the available limited selections of baud rate to be chosen (still plenty enough for almost any situation though), and a few neat features were added, such as user programmable shortcut buttons.
Documentation (PDF) and application (EXE) files are in the ZIP file below:
In the last year or two, clones of the Arduino UNO R3 and NANO boards have appeared on eBay and similar, selling for just a few dollars, and usually with free shipping. We have no interest at the moment in learning the Arduino language and associated programming software (such as libraries), but as these boards are very cheap and use standard Atmel chips, we bought a few of each to have a play with. They can be coded just as easily with the tools mentioned earlier, but with several advantages over the earlier methods:
> No need to make a board from scratch, at most a sub-board will be needed (if you are interfacing to higher than 5V and/or 20mA)
> Inbuilt USB communications port. This makes bug finding a lot easier (what's going on inside the chip can be displayed on the PC screen)
> The inbuilt USB communications port also makes it super easy to add PC control to a project
> Cost. The whole board can be bought, complete and assembled with connectors, voltage regulators, and 2 crystals - for less than it costs to post a bare unloaded board!
There were also a couple of minor disadvantages:
> The clones are largely undocumented and in one case had a wrong IC fitted to the board
> Limited range of baud speeds available, because the AVR chip is clocked with an external crystal in order to achieve the highest performance possible
Easy to overcome these limitations... the designs were simple to reverse-engineer and make drawings for, and a terminal program was written especially for these boards. It only allows the available limited selections of baud rate to be chosen (still plenty enough for almost any situation though), and a few neat features were added, such as user programmable shortcut buttons.
Documentation (PDF) and application (EXE) files are in the ZIP file below:
uterm2015b6.zip | |
File Size: | 463 kb |
File Type: | zip |
Follow the instructions in the PDF to set it up on your computer. EDIT: Upped version to Beta 6, to squish a minor bug that can have CPU usage peg at 100% on Intel Atom based machines with Windows 2000 or XP. Trevor from NSW on AVRF (we know who you are!) needs to buy himself a new computer! In the meantime, app works on the Atom...
Some of the boards have arrived, others we are still waiting on. Docs will be completed when they have all arrived.
More to come...
Some of the boards have arrived, others we are still waiting on. Docs will be completed when they have all arrived.
More to come...