Digilent just launched the Cerebot MC7 development board. It is based on the Microchip powerful dsPIC33FJ128MC706A digital signal processor and it features 4 onboard half bridges circuits rated for up to 25V 4A. Compared to their previous development boards based on Microchip microcontrollers like the PIC32 this one has a dedicated DSP which should improve your performance when doing digital signal processing. The board is currently priced at $119.
If you have a project based on 74XX logic circuits you should register for the competition. There’s about 3 weeks left before judging begins on October 21, still plenty of time for new entries and there are allot of prizes available.
tinyIMU V2 is a sensor unit useful for building quadrocopters or other platforms where you need to know the orientation of the given platform. It uses the MMA7455 3-axis accelerometer from Freescale with 10 bit output and the ITG3200 3-axis gyroscope from Invensense with 16 bit output. The PCB was designed to be as small as possible to save weight and space (both important parameters when flying). There is only a 4 pin header present on the PCB for power and I2C lines. The schematics and PCB was designed in Eagle and I’m releasing it under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (download link bellow).
This sensor unit has already been used successfully with AeroQuad software and its just a matter of having the right drivers for the sensors to use it with other platforms as well.
here is a video with tinyIMU connected to AeroQuad:
This was actually the first time I ever needed to multiplex analog channels so it was a good opportunity to learn how to use them. My task was to measure the temperature of 32 thermistors (NTC) with a microcontroller and later process that data. Obviously you cant find that much analog input channels on your common microcontroller so you need to multiplex the signals. First I looked for large analog multiplexers with 16 input channels but those are way too expensive. As it turns out its cheaper to use more smaller 8ch multiplexers(example Digikey pricing: 2pcs 16:1 mux from TI is $7.84 while 3pcs of 8:1 mux from TI is $1.53). I was able to get the 74HC4051 at a good price so I started creating the design around it.
With just four 74HC4051 I can multiplex 32 input channels to 4 outputs. The 74HC4051 has 3 select lines A,B,C and one enable line E. These 4 lines are used for control and they can be tied together like I did for controlling all 4 chips with the same 4 lines. By a combination of state (high/low) for A,B and C you can control which input gets connected to the output. In the schematic you will also find a table with the address select concerning the 3 pins A,B and C. The enable pin is used to disconnect all internal switches (when high) or allow connection (when low) by selecting the appropriate address. Each 74HC4051 got its own 0.1uF decoupling cap close to its supply pins and if you’re design is very sensitive to noise you can further optimize the layout and place more filtering on the supply lines.
To get a more stable reading at the output of the thermistor(actually at the output of the multiplexer) I also placed a low pass filter which later on after assembling and testing turned out to be unnecessary even creating problems because I was switching the lines faster than it took the filter to settle so I left the filter components out during assembly.
The PCB was manufactured at home hence the big vias and it was designed to allow a second board with the microcontroller to be stacked on top of it. Everything was tested on an Arduino and it works perfectly. The schematics and board file are released under CC-BY-SA and can be downloaded from the link bellow.
I spent the past 3 hours debugging my code that was absolutely fine. So just a quick note for everybody who’s working on pic32′s, if you’re using any math functions you have to include math.h; it is not enough to include the peripheral library (plib.h). The compiler won’t complain but you will get garbage out of your math functions.
And if you’re wondering what I was doing with all that math is just computing the temperature for a thermistor using the Steinhart–Hart equation.
