More New Toys

Look what arrived today. I really need to stop buying stuff.

Been after an ARM based development board for a while now. Not been really sure where to start then I stumbled upon these little beauties. The Steallaris Launch Pad from Texas Instruments. Based on the LM4F120H5QRFIG 80Mhz Cortex-M4F CPU with 256K Flash and 32K RAM bags of peripherals and external I/O. All this for less than a tenner. And the support online for these is phenomenal. Can't wait to get it up and running.

As well as the launchpad I also bought one of these little bluetooth modules from eBay.

Need a cheap way of achieving a short distance wireless serial link between two devices on another project. Was considering going down the ZigBee route but  the cheapest ZigBee modules I can find are nearly £30 each these little bluetooth modules are less than a third of the price. Lets just hope it works!

Traktor Compliant MIDI Controller Project - Part 2

Just a quick update I forgot to post.

Having never dabbled with USB on AVRs before getting communications working was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Thanks to Dean Camera's excellent USB stack LUFA I now have the virtual serial device working perfectly on my MinimusAVR board. I built a simple development board housing the Minimus and a couple of LEDs. I then sent commands to it using PuTTY to turn ON and OFF these leds.

That’s step one done now time to think about the remaining hardware.

simpleTerm - Terminal Emulation

As part of my work I tend to find myself using terminal emulation a lot for testing and debugging. Having used numerous terminal emulation packages including the likes of HyperTerminal, Tera Term, PuTTY etc I have yet to find anything that perfectly suits my needs.

So I decided to design my own. Here it is, simpleTerm (that's simpleTerm not simpleTon). Its written entirely in Visual Basic .NET. Its pretty simple. Only the serial port and baud rate can be selected, the data bits, parity and stop bits are all fixed at 8, None and 1 (which 99% of the time is all i'll be using anyway).

Other features include logging to file. Showing received data as either ASCII or hexadecimal. Sending data as a string or hexadecimal/decimal escape code. Sending preset sequences. Auto add carriage returns on send. Configurable background and foreground colors and remember last connection settings.

The screen shots above and below show me using it to communicate with my bus pirate.