BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32

May 21, 2011 by Phil Burgess 25 Comments

If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code and quite a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar development tools are available for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

We first mentioned these a couple weeks ago, but the software was unavailable at the time. Seeing the development tools in action was quite unexpected…

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Xoscillo Turns Arduino In An Oscilloscope

May 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

If you don’t have an oscilloscope you’d be surprised how many times you find yourself needing one. But if you have an Arduino on hand, the next time you might be able to get by with this software suite that can use a development board as oscilloscope inputs. The project is called xoscillo, and it allows an Arduino, or a Parallax USB Oscilloscope, to probe the signals while a computer does the heavy lifting.

The Arduino can be used for up to four input channels at 7 kHz. It’s possible to probe seven signals at 4 kHz as well. But the main feature that caught our eye is the ability to use several Arduino boards at one time in increase the number of channels available to you.

Granted, this is pretty slow for many digital electronic troubleshooting needs. But at least it’s something you can pull out when you just don’t have any other ideas about what is going wrong with your prototype circuit. We’re sure that sooner or later you’ll break down and buy a proper hackable oscilloscope. After all, your Arduino is probably already occupied as an I2C sniffer.

[Thanks Adam]

Arduino I2C Sniffer

May 21, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Johngineer] found himself in need of an I2C sniffer, but didn’t have one available. Necessity is the mother of invention, so he put together this I2C sniffer sketch for Arduino. The arduino will record what is going on for a set time interval, then dump the data via serial as a .csv. You then have to plot it to see what is going on. [Johngineer] recommends Livegraph, since it is portable and easy. As you can see in the code, the time interval is adjustable, but you have the physical limitations of the RAM on the board to consider. This seems like a pretty handy piece of code stored around, effectively giving you a passable I2C sniffer in a pinch.

Arduino Arcade Rom Dumper

May 18, 2011 by Kevin Dady 12 Comments

[Vincenzo] wanted to read some 82S129 bipolar proms, and why not, they were very common in the 1980’s arcade scene. The problem is that its kind of an odd ball part now, and typically only (even) more expensive EPROM programmers can read them. An Arduino, breadboard and some quick scripting quickly takes care of that problem with this Arcade Rom Reader.

You stick the prom in your breadboard, and wire it up to the appropriate ports and pins of the Arduino, which bit bangs the prom and returns the results though the serial connection of the Arduino. Using a terminal program on the pc side you capture the text and use a script to convert the ascii values into a binary nibble format and save as hex.

This makes it much easier for us to dump roms from old arcade boards, because you never know when you might run across an old Polybius arcade board on your next outing to the salvage or scrap yard.

Join us after the break for all the details and as always comments!

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Fixing Arduino’s Serial Latency Issues

May 18, 2011 by Mike Nathan 42 Comments

arduino_latency

[Paul] wrote in to tell us about some interesting Arduino latency issues he helped nail down and fix on the Arduino.

It seems that [Michu] was having some problems with controlling his Rainbowduino project we featured earlier this year, and he couldn’t quite figure out why he was experiencing such huge delays when sending and receiving data.

Searching online for answers turned up very little, and since [Michu] was using Processing, the pair designed a set of tests to see what kind of latency was being introduced by Java. Pitting an Arduino Uno and an Arduino from 2009 against a Teensy 2.0, the tests gauged the latency of native data transfers versus transfers facilitated by Java via the rxtx library it uses for serial communications.

The results were pretty stunning. While both of the Arduinos lagged behind the Teensy by a long shot, their latency values under Java were always 20ms at a minimum – something didn’t add up. [Michu] poked around in the rxtx code and found a mystery 20ms delay programmed into the serial library. It made no sense to him, so he changed the delay to 2ms and saw a drastic increase in performance when transferring less than 128 bytes of data.

The pair’s fix doesn’t seem to affect latency when larger amounts of data (>1kB) are being transferred, but it makes a world of difference when manipulating smaller chunks of data.

For the sake of disclosure, it should be noted that [Paul’s] company produces the Teensy mcu.

Bluetooth Super Nintendo Controller For Android Gaming

May 17, 2011 by Mike Nathan 21 Comments

bluetooth_snes_controller

[Rich] needed to come up with a senior design project and decided to combine two things he loved: his Android phone and Super Nintendo.

While touchscreen phones are great, he felt that nothing beats the tactile feedback of a physical controller when it comes to gaming. He figured out how the controller’s signaling works, then wired it up to an Arduino Pro Mini 328. The Arduino interprets the SNES controller’s signals, sending them to his Android phone via a BlueSMiRF Bluetooth module.

He originally had all of the components crammed in a cardboard box, but much like we pointed out yesterday, he realized that a project really comes together when housed in a proper enclosure. He managed to squeeze all of his components into the SNES controller’s shell aside from the battery pack he used to power the remote. After a little bit of Bondo and a few coats of paint were applied, the controller is looking quite sharp.

Stick around to see a quick demo video of his controller in action, and check out this tutorial he put together explaining some of the principles he used to construct it.

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Google ADK Project Shows Just How Easy It Is To Use

May 16, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

first_adk_project

[yergacheffe] was able to get his hands on a shiny new Google ADK board about a week before it was announced at I/O, and got busy putting together a neat project to show off some of the ADK’s features. His idea was to meld together the ADK and Google’s new music service, two items he says complement each other very well.

He had a handful of LED matrices left over from last year’s Maker Faire, which he decided to use as a Google music metadata display. The base of the display is made from laser-cut acrylic, with a few spare ShiftBrites lighting up the Google music beta logo.

He says it took literally just a couple lines of code to get his Android handset to talk with the display – a testament to just how easy it is to use the ADK.

Pretty much anyone can walk up, attach their phone, and see their current music track on the display with zero fuss, which you can see in the video demo below.

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