I have been thinking of ways to use this starter kit as a robot controller… The board has two 32 pin headers already. One idea I have is to get four more of these 32 pin headers and wire Vdd to one row and Vss to the other for each of the starter kit headers. This would provide the nice three pin headers we use for our robot projects. I’d use two of the new 32 pin headers for each header row on the starter kit.
Another idea I have is to use two 32 pin ribbon cables, which would have the single row pin compatible sockets on each end. This setup would make the starter kit board much better for general prototyping because the sockets would accept pins or jumper wires as required.
Sounds like a good idea to me . I have a similar thought on the Maveric 1B board that I have been playing with. They have something like 4 8 pin headers with a a pin blank between each 8 pin header on both the top and bottom of the board. I was thinking of trying to connect two 8 pin headers to some of these groups of pins, in order to make it easier to connect some of the different sensors. I was going to have the power pins connect up to the regulated +5v power, but I suppose on some of these 8 pin groups, I could try to connect these directly to a battery if I choose to have this board try to control some servos… Sorry I think I went a little off subject.
It seems this company is not interested in sales outside of the U.S. market. They wont send the starter kit here and although they said they would ship to me if I bought one, the support for it would be limited.
Not a very pro-active sales strategy that. I’ll stick with my Atmega’s I think. Cheaper and more powerful (and E.U. friendly).
Well, you have to understand that these companies give free samples in hopes that they will sell thousands, should a designer decide to use it in their next circuit design. That’s the strategy behind it anyway. I guess it really depends on who is handling the handouts. I doubt they are quick to give it to just any Joe who asks. It’s more likely Eddie or myself could probably get a sample if we used our work address and email, since we both work in the electronics industry.
I got my starter kit without any problems and just used my normal personal domain e-mail address. I just wish there were some other boards available that use the H8 chips, because they are nice and I am liking them better the more I learn about them. I’ve sure spent plenty of time reading the hardware manuals.
The other nice thing about this, is most of what you learn using the starter kit can be applied to programming the Atom PRO in C also. I am starting to dabble with C and the Atom PRO.
It’s good that you were able to get one sent to you. It depends on the person handling the request. Some people hand out stuff no questions asked and some do not. There are other factors that can play a role such as HOW you ask for the sample among some other variables.
It never hurts to ask, you have nothing to loose and everything to gain.
I am just getting a bit more into the H8 now and have been going through the example source code (learn quite a lot that way). The starter kit board has some LEDs on it that can be used as output devices, so I am going to try coding up a simple program to use them to “say hello” so to speak.
This will also be a good way to see if my io.h file allows me to do things the way I would like to. I also just received my latest LM order, and have some cables that might allow me to connect to whichever I/O pins on the starter kit I want to use. I would use this to bring the hardware I2C or other I/O pins out to my breadboard.
I will post more when I know if all this works or not.
This is what I have, and I have also registered to hopefully get an H8SX starter kit. I believe the H8SX is currently the big gun of the H8 family, with much more speed, more features, and up to 512K of flash for program storage.
I have not done the “hello world” type program for the stater kit yet, but I have been testing out my io.h file which will allow addressing the I/O pins and registers by the same names as the chip pin outs use. I have been working with a copy of the 7_Blink36077 workspace which is included with the starter kit.
So far, the indications are positive, and I have changed the main program to address the two I/O pins being used as P57 and P65 (as named in my io.h file) instead of the longer names used in iodefine.h and it is working.
I will now move on to adding the I/O control registers to io.h so they may also be accessed by their shorter names. The shorter names are way easier to remember and work with than the iodefine.h names. I am hoping this will make source code much easier to read and understand.
Once I get io.h finished, I will move on to working on a hello world type program of my own, based on what I have learned so far. I hope to eventually do this type of thing for all of the I/O and control registers of the H8/36077, which will be easily upgraded to work for more powerful members of the H8 family. I already have a version io.h that should work for the the H8 that the Atom PRO is based on (but not with the Basic Micro Atom PRO IDE at present), which is a subset of the H8/36077. My io.h file is based on the Renesas iodefine.h file that comes with the starter kit. If I stay with the Basic Micro microcontrollers, I am going to try to create an io.h file that will work with the Atom PRO.
My io.h file is based on the Renesas iodefine.h file that comes with the starter kit. If I stay with the Basic Micro microcontrollers, I am going to try to create an io.h file that will work with the Atom PRO.