It’s done. For now. After weeks of dithering, I finally got around to making up one of my SmartParallel serial-to-parallel printer interface PCBs. I chose to solder the components – mostly surface mount – by hand and that went easier than I expected. The only snag was that it didn’t work. Not right away, at least. And finding out where… Read more »
Success! The Go code I’d been struggling with is working, although it also required changes to the C++ code running on the ATMEGA328PB. Here’s a quick overview of how the process works. On the SmartParallel, the ATMEGA328PB code sits in a loop watching for incoming data on the serial port. It also monitors the state of the printer by frequently… Read more »
The principle of ‘one step at a time’ is very sound. The more changes you make at once, the more places there are for bugs to hide. And that’s why this project has been progressing slowly – or not at all – just lately. Finally, though, I feel like it might be back on track. A quick recap: SmartParallel is… Read more »
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 »
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 »
As part of my cunning plan to develop ‘smart’ sensors, I’ve been playing around with infrared rangefinders (and may do a post on those soon). But the first kind of rangefinder I ever tried was the ultrasonic type, so it was time to reacqauint myself. And, in particular, I wanted to see if I could do this on the cheap…. Read more »
It’s an increasingly digital world, but not all information comes packaged neatly in 1s and 0s. Sometimes you have to deal with analogue voltage levels using the microcontroller’s analogue to digital (ADC) converter. Measuring analogue voltages is made easy in Arduino projects because the IDE comes with a handy analogRead() function. Providing your input voltage does not exceed what the… Read more »
Microcontrollers can be busy little beasts. That’s because we load them down with jobs to do – sometimes too many jobs. In the main loop of an Arduino, AVR or whatever microcontroller takes your fancy, we often spend time polling sensors and then throwing away the data as uninteresting. On the robots I’ve built in the past, for example, that polling… Read more »
The DottyMatrix project began when I thought, ‘It would be nice to make use of my old Epson MX-80 F/T III dot matrix printer’. The problem was talking to it. But then I thought, ‘It’s just parallel printer interface. I’ll make a microcontroller-based device to act as an interface. How hard can that be?’. The answer, it turns out, is… Read more »
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 The I2C bus isn’t that hard to use and for most applications it’s pretty simple. However, there is a lot more depth to it than we’ve covered here. The purpose of this final post in the… Read more »
Part 1 – bit rate Part 2 – transmitting Part 3 – sending data Part 4 – receiving data Part 5 – final thoughts This builds on the previous two posts that dealt with the fundamentals of sending data over the I2C bus on AVR microcontrollers and then how you actually do it. Receiving is a similar process, except for… Read more »