The first thing I did when I progressed from Arduinos to programming Atmel 8-bit microcontrollers in the raw was build a programming and prototyping board. [BTW, for once, this is not going to be a multi-post project. I’m putting a bit of background here, but will put full, constantly updated details on the GitHub page.] Arduinos make it easy for… Read more »
Just when you thought it was over… When we last saw this project it was complete except for stuffing the joystick into some kind of box. As that kind of mechanical stuff doesn’t interest me greatly (and I’m crap at it), I wasn’t going to bother with a post about this final step. But hey, I’m nothing if not a… Read more »
And so back to the back-powering problem on my ever-imminent SmartParallel interface board. The issue is that, when the printer is powered on but the SmartParallel board isn’t, voltages coming from the printer via signal lines being held high are part-powering the board. One option was to simply ignore this problem. I find that works for a lot of things… Read more »
Having got impatient waiting for my PCBs to arrive from China, I went ahead and cobbled together some interim solutions for this project. And what happens? The PCBs arrive the next day. These are the ‘fixed’ PCBs with the proper footprint for the DB15 connector. And what can I tell you? They work. There is one slight issue that I… Read more »
While waiting for revised PCBs to arrive from China, I figured the time would be well spent learning a little more about the BBC Micro’s analogue port. And I have taken delivery of a couple of DB15 breakout boards, which meant I could try wiring up the joystick, albeit in a crude and temporary way. One joystick needs to send… Read more »
Although the stripboard version of the SmartParallel board is working, one niggle remained. When the printer was switched on, but the SmartParallel board wasn’t powered, I was getting random resets of the printer. They weren’t as frequent as with the breadboard prototype, but they were there, sometimes. Also, there was a problem with signals effectively ‘back powering’ (I’m not sure… Read more »
Okay, so the next stage of the stripboard prototype for the SmartParallel serial to parallel printer interface went well. Mostly. As planned, I added a bar LED block with eight segments to show the state of the data lines, along with power-limiting resistors in the form of a resistor array. I also added four LEDs. Three are driven via a… Read more »
Things went from bad to worse with the breadboard prototype of the SmartParallel serial to parallel printer interface. All was fine for a while. Lines of text sent from my Mac via an FTDI cable were duly printed on the Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer. But then, every now and again, the printer would randomly reset. After a… Read more »
It’s never a good idea to let signals float around in the no-man’s land between the high state and the low state. This is why we so often use pullup and pulldown resistors. You set the line to a known, definite state by default and then switch it as necessary. Some uses of pullup and pulldown resistors are obvious. Some… Read more »
Ah well, another valuable lesson learned. The PCBs for my homemade joystick, designed to work with the BBC Micro and Master, should have been very simple. They are very simple. And yet I still managed to screw up. The PCBs for both the main adapter, which plugs directly into the computer, and the connector for the joystick arrived the same… Read more »
A major reason for doing breadboard prototypes is to learn what mistakes you’ve made in your circuit design. Of course, it’s also a way to introduce brand new errors. Or both. Before committing to fabricating PCBs, I wanted to check out whether my design for the SmartParallel dot matrix printer interface would even work. My confidence was reasonably high because,… Read more »
Okay, I lied. Having ordered the PCBs for my Centronics breakout board, and also having ordered a couple of DB25 breakout boards via Ebay, I settled in for the long wait I knew would follow. I said in an earlier post that I was getting used to these two to three-week delivery times for stuff coming from China. The truth… Read more »
Jumper cables with DuPont headers are an essential part of your toolkit. Any dabbler in electronics will have drawers of the damn things – and probably not a few wandering randomly around the workbench. But when the time comes to buy more (where do they go?) there’s always a dilemma. Do you need male-male, female-female or female-male? And how many of… Read more »
Creating a full breadboard version of the SmartParallel board is turning out not to be a five-minute affair. It has to be done meticulously and methodically if it is to have any value as a prototype. Fitting it all on to a single breadboard is proving challenging too. And that got me thinking. What about replicating at least part of… Read more »
Hmm, yes, clearly it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that. While creating the PCB layout for the SmartParallel serial to parallel printer interface, I shuffled a few of the pin assignments on the Atmel ATMEGA328PB microcontroller. The reason was simply to make routing a tad easier. But I had a nagging feeling that this might cause a… Read more »