Not sure yet, but I assuming that the two should be able to go pretty close to each other. That is I am assuming they would have standard male pins soldered into main board and female connector on bottom of daughter board, but may be able to go closer. Note: I still need to do work on these as the top part will run into the power selection pins for some of the groups on the top of the board.
Also as I mentioned: I have currently 12 IO pins that are going into that connector, but only using 7. 4 of the ones I have not used are Change Notify pins, which are nice to have. These IO pins have interrupts that can be enabled to know when the pin state changes or not. In addition they have the potential to turn on a built-in pull-up resistor to these pins. I could/can use these pins for the 3 buttons and can potentially remove the PU resistors I added. Currently the Chip-kit IDE and support libraries do not have any default support for turning these on, but I have played with turning it on in my own code.
Also on the Daughter board, I have a duplicate 12 pin connector that is techniqually not needed, but if I had the extra IO’s I thought it would be nice to be able to use them…
I think I will probably put this design to bed (at least for now). It is unclear if this is an approach that makes sense long term, when hopefully in a near future Arduino will release the new 32 bit board that will have native support and not rely on a 3rd party IDE. I am torn for my own usage on what makes sense…
But I will put up two variations of the design, in case anyone is interested.
First an update to the last one, where the daughter board was changed to hopefully have the top miss the power selection… Also added lots of drills to make it hopefully easy to separate. If I continued, I would probably also thin up the board clearances…
The 2nd variation, made the assumption, that I almost never use the switches on the BB2, so I dropped those from the design and then fit the speaker plus support stuff and 3 LEDs on to the main board…
I hope that you some day consider to make the board yourself one day, it sure would be interesting to hear about.
I know you ported the Phoenix code to work on Arduino, but does it also work on a UNO32/MAX32?
I’m considering to buy a UNO/MAX-32 board to play with. The comming Arduino 32bit sounds interesting but its not available though.
Yep maybe sometime I will experiment and make my own board like this. There are lots of little pads to solder, so I would probably want to try some other approach than soldering iron. Maybe something like having a solder mask template made and use the frying pan…
But if I am doing this just for myself, then doing the shield, will probably work just fine. There are certain projects where the size won’t work, but I do think that will be an issue for most of my robots (Brat, Rover, Tri-track, Arm, xHR-3/4 Hex,), Probably won’t fit inside phoenix, but will fit on top, Not sure about T-Hex. Made progress on the shield design. Most of it is routed now. Nice thing about that project, is I can easily assemble it myself .
Yes, I also ported the code to run on UNO32, should run fine on MAX32 but don’t have one yet to test with. Still uses SSC-32. Want to test a version that handles the servos itself. May have to tear apart one of my Hex’s to do this, or see if I have enough spare parts to use my old CHR-3 body to build up some legs… May have to pick up more servos. Would be interesting to see how well it handles the servos. My guess is it should work great. Been sort of waiting until next test build of IDE comes out. Hopefully they will be closer to Arduino 1.0 compatibility, as well as some other support that may prove interesting.
My programming skills are far from yours so its good to hear that the code work on the PIC’s too. Personally I don’t really get the point of all the shield stuff. Why couldn’t the make the board like the BB2? Stacking yet another board on top takes just so much more space. A SSC-32 shield with speaker and buttons/led and normal pins for the other I/O port would be great though.
My intention of trying out the MAX32 is for controlling the robotis AX servos also. But I’ll wait and see, still not finished with MorpHex.
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