I decided to take Al’s lead and turn Friday into a fun day. Thus I’m in a talk about hacking with microcontrollers, a subject I know nothing about. I was going to go to a talk about Subversion Worst Practices, but it was pretty full…
Open Source hardware involves a bunch of things: mechanical diagrams, schematics & circuit diagrams, parts lists, layout diagrams, core/firmware, and software/API.
The Make Controller has a 32-bit ARM controller, has pen source firmware, API, and tools to play around with it. It’s not as open or cheap as the Arduino board, however.
So what are these things? Microcontroller boards are essentially computers on a chip. They have analogue and digital I/O, some memory (RAM and flash). They’re an interface to the physical world. The problems they solve are usually simple, and the code you run on them is correspondingly simple.
So how do you get started? Pick an input, first. Decide what you’re going to monitor, and this will usually dictate how you’ll be sending input to the microcontroller. You can use light sensors, tilt sensors, RFID, all sorts of different things. Then choose your output — what do you want your microcontroller to tell you. Again, there’s a wide range of possible outputs, from LEDs to motors to audio/video.
Software is fairly easy for people new to programming to set up — the tools look relatively user-friendly. You just tell hte program which pins to monitor, write a polling loop, then update the output when something changes. Watch out though when writing software to monitor inputs or write to output — sometimes it doesn’t always match the spec sheet.
You can buy all kinds of input sensors: RFID scanners, volatile compound sensors, pressure sensors. A serial-to-WiFi exists that allows you to use your microcontroller to access the internet through a telnet-level interface. There’s even a GSM module that you can hook up via a serial interface, and it has a Python interpreter on it. You can get a GPS module too. Attach it to a Bluetooth module and you can do fun things with other Bluetooth devices like cell phones.
#1 by Jeff on July 27th, 2007
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Heh. Welcome to my world. :)
This is basically what I do for a living. I’ve thought about getting into one of these hobby-level embedded boards for a while. The Make Controller could probably run eCos, which I’ve been itching to play with for years. Heck, I could find an old prototype board around work that no one’s using anymore and hack some open code and tools to run on it. The problem is I’ve just never thought of anything useful to turn one into that would justify the time.