Category: Microcontrollers

Tautic 8-pin Dev Board with BT module

I was considering a slightly more risqué description to this post but I suppose I need to keep it PG-13ish.

I’ve avoided my work bench a little too much lately. Why stay at home when I can be out in prime hiking season hitting some of those high elevation hikes that are going to be unreachable in a few more months? July-August-September is the best time to hit the cascades up here in the PNW. Well I started feeling a little guilty that I haven’t finishing my portable weather station and it certainly won’t be done maybe winter hiking but I felt it was time to get a jump on it. In an effort to start using more of these little dev boards I’ve picked up from microcontrollershop.com, or tinde: I decided to pull out this little 8 pin dev board because it seemed like it was just big enough to squeeze the bluetooth on top of it. Tautic’s board isn’t really big enough for the module I picked up from Sparkfun as you see in the photo but the extra pins aren’t anything I’m using and I’ll figure out something clever to do with them if they really start to bug me. This is another example of a great tiny little board that can be used on anything. Jayson makes some great boards… I look forward to seeing what else he comes out with. As always, this thing is dirty cheap and I can’t imagine he makes much money selling these.

I promise next post I’ll dig out something that’s actually crap. I was just a huge fan of working with this board. I’ll post some code this fall… but for now I need to find a cheap mountain bike and make some emergency changes to my labor day backpacking plans!

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PIC-based ESR meter

My homebrew ESR meter spots a cap that is less than desirable. If anyone is interested I have my .asm code I am happy to share. The board is an Olimex prototyping development kit I got from ‘microcontrollershop’. It’s all assembler .. No C version and no desire to work on this anymore. The electrical aspects are documented in the code to some degree (enough that *I* could rebuild it…) I don’t have any plans for a kit. If you want the code you’ll have to agree that you’re building this project for yourself with no re-distribution. I don’t trust my code enough to be considered for some sort of commercial use.

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IGBT EconoPACK test for my homebrew variable frequency drive.

I mocked-up a test of my IGBT Infineon EconoPACK. I had a 24VDC to 95VDC 200w boost brick and fed the IGBT that just because… It made a nice isolated power supply. After I got everything together I feared I had gotten a bad module, but because I know myself I went over everything and realized I failed to pull the /RESET up and so I figure that’s my most likely cause of my inability to get this thing to switch. Everything on the board looks good.. I guess I’ll give it a try again tomorrow. I just got my Pi booted up but I’m hoping I can easily jump in and use it to drive this IGBT pack. If not I’ll just fall back to a PIC. Driving the pack is straight forward; I was just hoping to save myself some development time. This will be my first VFD.. I’m hoping not my last. I scored a 230V 3 phase motor that is about 2 HP. I’m about 95% sure of what I’m going to use this for but I’ll admit it wouldn’t be the first time I stole parts from one project to build another. I’ll see what this Pi can do this weekend after I get back from taking a hike with my daughter on Saturday. I guess Monte Cristo is getting shut down for two years and I want her to experience it. Eight miles is the limit to her hiking abilities right now but she’ll make it, 700ft of elevation gain.. she probably worked harder walking around disney land.

I pulled most of the parts of this project out of storage. While going through old parts I brought back from my house in SD I also found some nifty scintillation detection goodies, gobs of tools, some of my CDP1802 Elf II stuff and a ton of other stuff that I’m sure will make it’s way to my blog. I found a few boxes of 2-20GHz  stuff I was ratting away for some EME project but I think I’ll just give that away to a HAM radio club.

My first attempt at testing the IGBT EconoPACK.. this one is oversized but the price was right. 1.2kV 450A... yeah... way over sized.
My first attempt at testing the IGBT EconoPACK.. this one is oversized but the price was right. 1.2kV 450A… yeah… way over sized.

TAUTIC’s 20 Pin Development Kit

I am a sucker for development kits/boards; they are cheap and if you have the room in your project they shave tons of room off your development time. Semi-recently, I was looking for a 18 or 20 PIC development board to plug into a main board. There are tons of boards that have various relays and switches and such but I wanted a bare-bones board that was good for bread-boarding and then could be plugged into my Sumo Roomba bot. These are shockingly hard to find for some reason? While I was sniffing around I ran into Jayson Tautic’s website which led me to purchase his 20-pin PIC development board on tinde. This thing was dirt cheap, and came remarkably fast! I put the thing together in a few moments and it sat in my “do-something-with-this-stuff” pile for a a few weeks. This kit comes with a 16F1509 which was great for what I was working on; it’s not-so-great if you still are rocking a PICKit2, it’s time to upgrade to the 3! I build out the “hello world” circuit shown below but in the end I went in a different direction and used a different board with an 18F2331. Did the board end up in the bottom of a drawer soon to be forgotten? (whats in there these days??: Cymbet energy harvesting stuff, a few 8 pin & 14 pin boards from piccircuit & micrcocontrollershop, a little 5/3.3V switcher kit, MMA7361, a few PICKit demo boards.. hmmm some other random stuff lower down)  Nope! While hiking I decided it was destined for a greater purpose. I wanted to build my own barometer for “storm warning” while hiking the cascades this summer. I dug a BMP085 development board I purchased from Sparkfun earlier on this year and went to work; That code is coming along but isn’t quite finished. While working with this TAUTIC board I can say it is very clean, looks nice, and it’s rock solid. I highly recommend this dev board if you want to plop something down on your breadboard and hack away at.

Yeah, I know, another annoying blinking LED. This was just a 'hello world' test before I was going to get serious to make sure I had my osc and such set up right.
Yeah, I know, another annoying blinking LED. This was just a ‘hello world’ test before I was going to get serious to make sure I had my osc and such set up right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you’re interested in some of the basic code just to get it going, here is what I consider to be the important stuff to get you might like to use:

#include “p16f1509.inc”

__CONFIG _CONFIG1, _FOSC_INTOSC & _WDTE_OFF & _PWRTE_OFF & _CLKOUTEN_OFF
__CONFIG _CONFIG2, _LVP_OFF & _STVREN_ON

and…

INIT: ;General Init
BANKSEL ANSELA ;All Digital Pins
CLRF ANSELA
CLRF ANSELB
CLRF ANSELC

BANKSEL OSCCON
MOVLW 0x78 ;16MHZ Clock
MOVWF OSCCON

BANKSEL TRISC
CLRF PORTC
CLRF TRISC

BANKSEL 0x00
RETURN