It’s great when a plan comes together. Having independently played around with my DottyMatrix serial-to-parallel printer interface and the Virtual Printer (designed to simulate my still-dead Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer), it was time to hook them together. And it worked! On the left is the DottyMatrix using my prototyping board for the ATMEGA328PB microcontroller. Its serial port… Read more »
In building my AVR ATMEGA328P-based ‘virtual parallel printer‘, there were two signals that required special treatment. So it was time to revisit interrupts. On a Centronics-style parallel port, the host machine sends an ‘init’ or reset signal to the printer to tell it to flush its buffers and set itself to the default state. It also sends a ‘strobe’ signal… Read more »
Here’s a tip for anyone building a device designed to interface with a parallel printer – you kind of need a parallel printer to test it on. That shouldn’t have been a problem. My DottyMatrix project – which will allow me to send data over a serial connection and have it printed on my Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix… Read more »
Some time ago, I wrote about how I’d hacked together a board to program and experiment with AVR ATMEGA328P microcontrollers. Well, now I’ve stepped things up a bit. Mk.II The key features of the old board were a ‘zero insertion force’ (ZIF) socket for the microcontroller chip and a 2×3 HE10 socket to take the ISP cable from my programmer… Read more »
Part 1 – bit rate Part 2 – transmitting Part 3 – sending data Part 4 – receiving data Part 5 – final thoughts So in the first post in this series, we looked at how to configure the bus speed for I2C. Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s start sending stuff over the bus. The I2C… Read more »
When it comes to getting devices to talk to each other you’re spoiled for choice. There’s good, old-fashioned serial via UARTs, I2C (which I like a lot) and what is rapidly becoming my new favourite, the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). So let’s take a look at that. [Quick side note: please remember I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m… Read more »
One of the more challenging aspects of writing code for microcontrollers is not being able to liberally sprinkle your code with PRINT statements to show the state of variables and whatnot at particular moments. If you’re working with Arduino-type devices you can always fire up the Serial library and print stuff that way – back down the wire to a… Read more »
Once you’ve set up a pin, or a whole port’s worth of pins, as inputs or outputs, it’s time to start writing and reading values. This series is part of my learning process and I hope it will help others who, like me, are embarking on projects such as programming AVR chips. The way I learn things is to write… Read more »