Every once in a while I come across a component that gets me dreaming. This morning I received a press release about such a component: a wireless EEPROM from STMicroelectronics. The M24LR64-R is a 64 Kbit EEPROM with password protection and a dual interface. It has a standard 400 kHz I2C bus for reading and writing the device, but it also has an ISO 15693 compatible 13.56 MHz contactless interface. You can actually read and write this chip using RFID and near field communications (NFC) techniques without needing to power it. I think that is pretty cool.
Every time when I had to draw a PCB with memory, especially the kind with lots of address and data pins, interfacing in parallel to a processor, I started dreaming about wireless memory. Wouldn’t it be great if you only had to plunk a memory chip on a board, somewhere in the vicinity of the processor and not wire anything? Instead of transmitting over the air you could probably use a copper or some other metal plane as a better communication medium. Or you could make the PCB out of wood or paper and stick the components on it with ecological glue.
Maybe some day wireless will be so cheap that you can have intelligent wireless resistors, capacitors and other parts that could be mesh-networked to build a circuit. You simply put the components in a bag or box, like rice or sugar, and it all would work without wires and soldering. OK, that is a bit far fetched, but who knows what we will have 50 years from now? This RFID EEPROM is definitely a step in the right direction.
This kind of dreaming reminds me of the time when I was a kid and a friend of mine had a Tandy electronics experimentation kit with resistors, transistors and other parts. It used springs for wiring. We would wire at random the parts together while fantasizing about the amazing things our circuit would do. Of course nothing ever happened (and somehow we never smoked anything), but it kept us busy after school. Being nerds we had not yet discovered girls, but I did get a glimpse of his mum naked. Maybe one of our random circuits did work after all…
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
PSoC 5 Design Challenge
Here is yet another design contest:
Cypress Semiconductor announced the ARM Cortex-M3/ PSoC 5 Design Challenge, a contest to find the most innovative and useful designs from the millions of possibilities available to designers using the Cypress PSoC 5 architecture powered by the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. The contest is presented in conjunction with EE Times and ARM with the Grand Prize to be awarded in May, 2011. A total of over $10,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded throughout the contest, including the $2,500 Grand Prize. More information, including how to enter the contest and how to become a judge, as well as lively interaction from participants and the engineering community is available here.
Cypress Semiconductor announced the ARM Cortex-M3/ PSoC 5 Design Challenge, a contest to find the most innovative and useful designs from the millions of possibilities available to designers using the Cypress PSoC 5 architecture powered by the ARM Cortex-M3 processor. The contest is presented in conjunction with EE Times and ARM with the Grand Prize to be awarded in May, 2011. A total of over $10,000 in cash and prizes will be awarded throughout the contest, including the $2,500 Grand Prize. More information, including how to enter the contest and how to become a judge, as well as lively interaction from participants and the engineering community is available here.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Sceptre library update
The December issue of Elektor (now on sale) includes a 32-page supplement dedicated to microcontroller projects. In this supplement you will find two articles related to the Sceptre.
First of all there is a 4-page article about Oberon-07, a high-level PASCAL-like programming language, but object oriented. If you know MODULA-2 you will quickly find your marks, if you don't, well then it is pretty straightforward too. Oberon-07 has special features for microcontroller programming. It is f.i. very simple to manipulate bits and registers. Oberon-07 compiles very quickly in very efficient code. The Astrobe IDE makes things even easier thanks to its many libraries and comfy editing options. Serial comms, I2C, math & strings, and much more, it is all ready for you. Go check it out.
The second Sceptre article presents an extension card with a Nokia 6100 mobile phone color LCD, a Blackberry trackball and a 16 Mbit flash memory chip on it. All is controlled over an SPI bus, so the card doesn't use a lot of the Sceptre's I/O. Thanks to a nice open-source driver it is easily possible to display images at a framerate of more than 10 per second!
The fun thing of this card is that it doubles as a universal Arduino shield adapter for the Sceptre. A 16-bit I/O expander from Microchip together with some more Sceptre GPIO make the Sceptre compatible with an Arduino. You can now simply plug an Arduino shield on the Sceptre and use it. As there are many shields available, this unlocks a huge playground for Sceptre enthusiasts.
CAD (Eagle) files and software for this project are freely available together with a library update for the Sceptre. New functions (f.i. RFID), new examples (including a real MIDI file player!) and improved modules (better Bluetooth) make new applications easier. Go get your download here.
First of all there is a 4-page article about Oberon-07, a high-level PASCAL-like programming language, but object oriented. If you know MODULA-2 you will quickly find your marks, if you don't, well then it is pretty straightforward too. Oberon-07 has special features for microcontroller programming. It is f.i. very simple to manipulate bits and registers. Oberon-07 compiles very quickly in very efficient code. The Astrobe IDE makes things even easier thanks to its many libraries and comfy editing options. Serial comms, I2C, math & strings, and much more, it is all ready for you. Go check it out.
The second Sceptre article presents an extension card with a Nokia 6100 mobile phone color LCD, a Blackberry trackball and a 16 Mbit flash memory chip on it. All is controlled over an SPI bus, so the card doesn't use a lot of the Sceptre's I/O. Thanks to a nice open-source driver it is easily possible to display images at a framerate of more than 10 per second!
The fun thing of this card is that it doubles as a universal Arduino shield adapter for the Sceptre. A 16-bit I/O expander from Microchip together with some more Sceptre GPIO make the Sceptre compatible with an Arduino. You can now simply plug an Arduino shield on the Sceptre and use it. As there are many shields available, this unlocks a huge playground for Sceptre enthusiasts.
CAD (Eagle) files and software for this project are freely available together with a library update for the Sceptre. New functions (f.i. RFID), new examples (including a real MIDI file player!) and improved modules (better Bluetooth) make new applications easier. Go get your download here.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Renesas RX Design Contest
The Design Contest seems to be the new weapon of choice for microcontroller manufacturers to get attention for their products. NXP is currently running the mbed Design Challenge and two weeks ago Renesas announced their RX Design Contest. Over $110,000 worth of prizes will be distributed amongst the participants.
The Design Contest is also a good way for electronics enthusiasts to get a nice piece of hardware for free. NXP is handing out LPC1768 Cortex-M3 mbed modules for free and the first 1,000 participants of the Renesas contest get a complimentary RX62NRDK development board.
This board supports most flavors of USB, has a color graphics display, LEDs, buttons, SD-card connector and whatever you may need in a project. Random particpants will also get a full licence for Micrium uC/Probe together with the book uC/OS-III RTOS for the Renesas RX.
The contest finalists will be announced on March 13, 2011. The final judging will be at the ESC in San Jose, California on May 3, 2011.
(See also here and here for other contests.)
The Design Contest is also a good way for electronics enthusiasts to get a nice piece of hardware for free. NXP is handing out LPC1768 Cortex-M3 mbed modules for free and the first 1,000 participants of the Renesas contest get a complimentary RX62NRDK development board.
This board supports most flavors of USB, has a color graphics display, LEDs, buttons, SD-card connector and whatever you may need in a project. Random particpants will also get a full licence for Micrium uC/Probe together with the book uC/OS-III RTOS for the Renesas RX.
The contest finalists will be announced on March 13, 2011. The final judging will be at the ESC in San Jose, California on May 3, 2011.
(See also here and here for other contests.)
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Eagle switches to XML
Last week a rumor started spreading about Eagle, the popular schematic capture and PCB drawing package used by thousands of electronics enthusiasts, switching to a text-based file format. We at Elektor asked CadSoft, the editor of Eagle, about this rumour and got it confirmed. Somewhere in the hopefully near future Eagle will start using an XML-based file format for storing its drawings. The reason for this change is, according to CadSoft, that the binary format has reached its limits.
I find this reason a bit strange. Why would a text format be more flexible than a binary format? I mean, text is just limited binary, right?
Of course a text-based format is human readable, which is an advantage when trying to debug a broken file. But will this help in real life with a multi-megabyte sized file? (BTW, I have never yet had to debug a PCB file.)
A text-based format will be cross-platform as it avoids byte ordering issues, a good thing. Using XML is probably a good idea too, because it is a well known format and many tools & libraries for fiddling with XML files are readily available.
For the user a text-based format is interesting as it may help speed up certain repetitive tasks like net labeling or copying blocks. Users will start writing utilities for manipulating Eagle files.
Will they? Probably. They always do.
But Eagle already offers a powerful scripting language that lets you do lots of things without learning the file format first, so why bother? By writing a script you can already export everything yourself to a human readable format. And that is exactly what RS did for DesignSpark, the competitor of Eagle Freemium by Farnell (who bought CadSoft some time ago). RS offers scripts that allow you to export Eagle files as ASCII data. This is what it looks like:
EAGLE_INTERMEDIATE_ASCII "my_board.brd"
(asciiHeader
(fileUnits IN)
)
(library Library_1
(padStyleDef "Oval1"
(holeDiam 0.0314961)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Oval) (shapeWidth 0.0514961) (shapeHeight 0.102992))
)
(padStyleDef "Round1"
(holeDiam 0.125984)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Ellipse) (shapeWidth 0.133984) (shapeHeight 0.133984))
)
(padStyleDef "Rectangle1"
(holeDiam 0)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Rect) (shapeWidth 0.07) (shapeHeight 0.1))
(padShape (layerNumRef 16) (padShapeType Ellipse) (shapeWidth 0) (shapeHeight 0))
)
…
That is not so different from XML, is it?
The only reason I can think of why Farnell/CadSoft wants to switch to XML is that they hope that the heavyweights like Cadence or Pads will start writing Eagle import filters for their products. These products already know XML, it would be easy enough to add Eagle support. And that would be a good sales argument for Eagle. Start simple and low-budget with Eagle and when you’re ready to move on to something more serious you won’t lose your work.
It is all about compatibility.
I find this reason a bit strange. Why would a text format be more flexible than a binary format? I mean, text is just limited binary, right?
Of course a text-based format is human readable, which is an advantage when trying to debug a broken file. But will this help in real life with a multi-megabyte sized file? (BTW, I have never yet had to debug a PCB file.)
A text-based format will be cross-platform as it avoids byte ordering issues, a good thing. Using XML is probably a good idea too, because it is a well known format and many tools & libraries for fiddling with XML files are readily available.
For the user a text-based format is interesting as it may help speed up certain repetitive tasks like net labeling or copying blocks. Users will start writing utilities for manipulating Eagle files.
Will they? Probably. They always do.
But Eagle already offers a powerful scripting language that lets you do lots of things without learning the file format first, so why bother? By writing a script you can already export everything yourself to a human readable format. And that is exactly what RS did for DesignSpark, the competitor of Eagle Freemium by Farnell (who bought CadSoft some time ago). RS offers scripts that allow you to export Eagle files as ASCII data. This is what it looks like:
EAGLE_INTERMEDIATE_ASCII "my_board.brd"
(asciiHeader
(fileUnits IN)
)
(library Library_1
(padStyleDef "Oval1"
(holeDiam 0.0314961)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Oval) (shapeWidth 0.0514961) (shapeHeight 0.102992))
)
(padStyleDef "Round1"
(holeDiam 0.125984)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Ellipse) (shapeWidth 0.133984) (shapeHeight 0.133984))
)
(padStyleDef "Rectangle1"
(holeDiam 0)
(padShape (layerNumRef 1) (padShapeType Rect) (shapeWidth 0.07) (shapeHeight 0.1))
(padShape (layerNumRef 16) (padShapeType Ellipse) (shapeWidth 0) (shapeHeight 0))
)
…
That is not so different from XML, is it?
The only reason I can think of why Farnell/CadSoft wants to switch to XML is that they hope that the heavyweights like Cadence or Pads will start writing Eagle import filters for their products. These products already know XML, it would be easy enough to add Eagle support. And that would be a good sales argument for Eagle. Start simple and low-budget with Eagle and when you’re ready to move on to something more serious you won’t lose your work.
It is all about compatibility.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Build a dishwashing surveillance system
Every once in while I spend an afternoon or evening just browsing eBay. I do some searches on keywords concerning things that may interest me and I look through the results. When I find something interesting I click on the item for more details. Often I come across items that are sold by Chinese companies that sell lots of other things too. These are my favorite sellers. There are many Chinese eBay shops that sell exactly the same products, they probably are all related, but every once in a while I discover a new “family” of shops with different products.
My latest find is a series of cheap microcontroller boards equipped with a small camera and a 2.8” color TFT display. The camera, 640x320 pixels, is actually a small module that is plugged on top of the board, while the display (320x240 pixels, 262K colors) sits on the other side. You can make a camcorder out of it, because it has a micro SD card connector for storage.
I bought the ATmega32 board including a USBasp ISP programming cable for less than 35 euros (shipping included). It is a complete development system with full documentation and source code in C (with comments in garbage characters, probably Chinese). When it arrived I discovered that the display even has a resistive touchpad on it.
Here is a sneak preview of my killer app for this board: a dishwashing surveillance system that checks my dishwashing qualities. It will detect dirt on the dishes and sound an alarm when everything is dry. Pretty cool, huh?
So, what will you do with it?
My latest find is a series of cheap microcontroller boards equipped with a small camera and a 2.8” color TFT display. The camera, 640x320 pixels, is actually a small module that is plugged on top of the board, while the display (320x240 pixels, 262K colors) sits on the other side. You can make a camcorder out of it, because it has a micro SD card connector for storage.
I bought the ATmega32 board including a USBasp ISP programming cable for less than 35 euros (shipping included). It is a complete development system with full documentation and source code in C (with comments in garbage characters, probably Chinese). When it arrived I discovered that the display even has a resistive touchpad on it.
Here is a sneak preview of my killer app for this board: a dishwashing surveillance system that checks my dishwashing qualities. It will detect dirt on the dishes and sound an alarm when everything is dry. Pretty cool, huh?
So, what will you do with it?
Monday, September 13, 2010
RFID made simple
More and more people are using the Sceptre ARM7 board from Elektor, which is good. The Sceptre is supported with an open source library in C and I am currently working on adding new functionality to it. As I wrote in a previous article I spent quite some time understanding the BTM222/112 Bluetooth modules and this will soon be included in the library.
I also received a request for RFID support and so I implemented a driver for the EM4095 transceiver (EM Microelectronic) that can read the tags you can buy for cheap on eBay (for instance).
To get me started I bought in Hong-Kong (through eBay of course) for 17.50 euros (shipping included!) a fully functional RFID proximity door entry access system with 10 tags and 5 badges. Only a week later the kit arrived.
This turned out to be a pretty nice product actually; its only downside is its cheap plastic housing that will probably not survive very long outdoors. Rain and intruders will not have a very hard time getting to the electronics.
Top side of PCB
Bottom side of PCB
The antenna is slightly larger than the PCB
Interesting about this unit is that it uses a "discrete" (well, sort of, compared to a single chip solution) radio, built around a 4069 and a 74393. I traced the circuit (see below), but I didn’t measure the capacitors (all SMD) except for C3 which has 2.2 nF (222J) printed on it. It seems hard to believe that this solution is cheaper than using a dedicated chip like the EM4095, but it probably is. Or maybe the design is older?
The processor is a W78E052DDG, a pretty standard 8051-clone by Nuvoton (formerly known as Winbond).
I only used the antenna from the kit (and of course the tags) for my experiments since I had the EM4095 chip on a break-out board and now that I am done, I am looking for an application for my "RFID proximity door entry access system". What about a cat door opener? Hmmm…
P.S. The RFID driver will be included in the Sceptre library. An update is scheduled with the December issue of Elektor (available half of Novembre). If you can't wait that long, just drop me a line.
I also received a request for RFID support and so I implemented a driver for the EM4095 transceiver (EM Microelectronic) that can read the tags you can buy for cheap on eBay (for instance).
To get me started I bought in Hong-Kong (through eBay of course) for 17.50 euros (shipping included!) a fully functional RFID proximity door entry access system with 10 tags and 5 badges. Only a week later the kit arrived.
This turned out to be a pretty nice product actually; its only downside is its cheap plastic housing that will probably not survive very long outdoors. Rain and intruders will not have a very hard time getting to the electronics.
Interesting about this unit is that it uses a "discrete" (well, sort of, compared to a single chip solution) radio, built around a 4069 and a 74393. I traced the circuit (see below), but I didn’t measure the capacitors (all SMD) except for C3 which has 2.2 nF (222J) printed on it. It seems hard to believe that this solution is cheaper than using a dedicated chip like the EM4095, but it probably is. Or maybe the design is older?
The processor is a W78E052DDG, a pretty standard 8051-clone by Nuvoton (formerly known as Winbond).
I only used the antenna from the kit (and of course the tags) for my experiments since I had the EM4095 chip on a break-out board and now that I am done, I am looking for an application for my "RFID proximity door entry access system". What about a cat door opener? Hmmm…
P.S. The RFID driver will be included in the Sceptre library. An update is scheduled with the December issue of Elektor (available half of Novembre). If you can't wait that long, just drop me a line.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
