Protoboards..
Posted By matt on August 22, 2009
So, I’m hitting this odd dichotomy, which I don’t understand.
Of course, there’s Arduino, which is a nice little embedded micro which has analog and digital I/O’s. Decent, functional, basically bare metal.
As a minor step up, Freescale is doing these tower systems, which are kind of a step up – beefier CPU, etc.
The thing which kills me about these is the cost. I mean, they’re like $100, and have nowhere near the hardware of a bog standard Intel Atom Little Falls board.
The kicker is that the Atom boards lack any type of ADC, and looking around, dedicated boards for that are another $100, which is just silly. Where are the Intel atom based protoboards designed for embedded devices? I mean, you could do a board like that, sell it for $200, and undercut the ARM protoboard market by 50%.
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I've had a lot of luck with the Arduino platform. For a little over $35 (if you grab the right implementation like the Duemilanove) you have a nice little board that is easy to access all of the pins, can support the Arduino shields (if that's what you're interested in,) and is powered right off of the USB connection.
I'm using the platform to build a vehicle telemetry device for the local Red Cross' radio truck.
Right now, that is the direction in which I'm leaning. I'm thinking of using it to control the planned indoor winter garden (because I'm tired of not having decent tomatoes 9 months out of the year). Light, water, etc.
The issue is, to do it right, I need quite a bit of failsafe and feedback, lest I come home to a flooded house because the water cutoff relay failed…
Can you recommend a good “how to get started”? It looks like their IDE handles the basic bootstrapping of “set the PC to this and make it go”, and while I would very much like to know *what* they did, it doesn't really affect what I'm trying to do.
Oh, and I was looking at doing an unassembled kit buy and assembling it myself. Any suggestions on sources?
Also, what is necessary for communications? It's usb, so I'd expect I wouldn't need something like a logic to RS232 converter or other such silliness..
For resources checkout the following for deals:
http://makershsed.com (they sometimes have the stuff on special)
http://sparkfun.com
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/
Make magazine has a book called: “Making Things Talk” which features a lot of Arudino and general PC projects, networking them, hooking them to sensors.
You may find some inspiration from the Garduino Project: http://garduino.dirtnail.com/
The USB uses a common USB terminal driver, I've had trouble with it on Windows 2000 boxes, but it runs fine in XP.
Thanks!
Oh, and I don't run windows, so that's not really a concern.
I just ran across an intel Dual-core Atom 330 board (with CPU) at CDW for 80 bucks.
I should add, it's mini-ITX.
Yeah, I'm amazed at how cheap they are…
Some of them even have the virtualization registers, too..