Here's what I've been working on for the last couple of weeks:
This is a USB interface board I've built around a PIC 18f4550 microcontroller from Microchip. As many of you probably know, I've used my computer's parallel port to connect many things to my computer. However, most laptops don't have parallel ports these days, so I needed a way to connect things without a parallel port. This board does exactly that (and actually much, much more). I found a really nice tutorial on building this board here - http://eegeek.net/content/view/13/32/
You can make your C#, VB, C++ programs communicate with the chip using the open-source MCHPFSUSB Framework from Microchip, or the Window's HID drivers. The framework comes with lots of samples to get you started.
I've put a bootloader on the chip for the sake of convenience. With a bootloader, you don't have to take the chip off the board and put it in a separate programmer for programming. I have to sometimes re-program the chip every 10-15 minutes during development (especially when there's a hard to find bug), and the bootloader really makes it easy.
No project is compete until you record a video! So here's one:
Please excuse the background noise in the video. There was some construction work going on while I was recording this. Anyway, I'm using the board to control some LEDs, a servo, and reading the value of a potentiometer. Controlling the servo was the trickiest part because servo's are sensitive to timing. They expect to receive a pulse every 20 ms, and the duration of the pulse determines how much they will turn. The length of the pulse usually varies between 1-2 ms. Setting up the timers on the chip to work properly was a bit challenging, but I finally got it working. This sound card based oscilloscope really helped! - http://www.zeitnitz.de/Christian/scope_en.
Hope you enjoyed this post. I will be using this board in future projects. Keep checking!
