I still have many projects going on, but I keep wanting to get back to my Arduino based DIY remote control. The question is which is the best way to go about doing it. My assumption and desire is that this will continue being some form of Arduino and not some BAP based project.
I could continue using my Seeeduino Mega with the prototype shield, which works well, but is a pain in that you have to buy the board, solder on it’s connectors, build the shield and then try to get all of them pins in the right holes… Then it is pretty thick. It will fit,especially since the new box is a bit taller, but…
Could go with my new shield, and standard Arduino Mega, which has some of the same issues, Still plan to build a second one and try on standard mega…
BotBoardDuino won’t do: only 6 Analog pins (My original uses 8, my Arduino Mega one uses 9). Only 14 digital…
So I started to play arround with yet another all in one board design. My goal was to make it such that I could build it myself. So I want to avoid soldering in an Atmega, or an FTDI chip or others like this with really small pins… So I ruled out an Atmega1280 or like. Could start with Botboarduino and try to work up. This may be the best approach, but instead I thought I would try something different.
So I thought I would try one that is based on the Sanguino board (sanguino.cc/hardware), like LinuxGuy wanted. This board uses an Atmega644, which comes in a very big DIP package. Has 64K of memory, 8 Analog and 24 Digital pins, 2 Usarts, which gets me a lot closer.
Note: the Arbotix Controller that Trossen sells is also based on this design. There are issues with this as the SanGuino design is non-standard. Awhile ago the users were restricted to use I think build 0014 of the Arduino IDE. I think the current ones have most of the support in them, but you have to edit the Boards.txt file. I would like to confirm this. May ask up on Trossen…
Here is a first pass design:
The board is currently 3"x2.8".
The bottom IO pins are Digital pins 0-19(Left to right). On the Top Left are 20-23. On the top Right are Analog pins 0-7. Like Arbotix, the FTDI stuff is not on the board. There are 6 pins on the Left that you can plug in the Sparkfun (or equiv) FTDI breakout board. Also you have an ISP plug, which I know Trossen recommends using to program. I put jumpers in that allow you to have XBee on either USART0 or 1. I get the impression that the boatloader can allow you to program the chip using the XBEE at 38400. I have a speaker as I like sound on my remote. I was going to add Buttons/Leds, but not much room for them and I don’t use them when the board is inside a case…
Things I am for sure thinking about doing:
a) Add a jumper to disable the 3.3v circuit, including XBee
b) Add more Analog pins. I am thinking of trying to get more Analog pins. Maybe by adding a Analog Mux like what is used on Arc32. Could use a 2x8 Mux from Analog devices. This would use 2 Digital and 2 Analog pins to give me 8 Analog. Will be interesting to see where I can fit it. Also will probably not have 3 pin connections for these, as I don’t know where I would fit them, unless I make the board a lot larger. One thought would be to do like Arc32 and overlay them on to Digital pins…
Thoughts?
Kurt