Wednesday, March 20, 2013

mbed Application Board



The mbed boards are a series of ARM microcontroller development boards designed for rapid prototyping and this is breakout makes it easy to get up and running with your mbed LPC1768 module. The new application board has been designed to enable the maximum number of potential experiments and projects, with the minimum footprint. And this thing is small.

This credit-card sized breakout board makes it easy to plug in to a whole bunch of peripherals. Simply pop an LPC1768 mbed module into the socket and you've got access to a 128x32 graphic lcd, 5-way joystick, accelerometer, temperature sensor and more! There are headers on either side of the mbed module socket as well so you can jumper off to breadboards and other off-board components.


http://www.hobbytronics.co.uk/mbed-application-board

Friday, December 21, 2012

Arduino Colour TFT Shield


If you ever wanted to add a top quality display to your Arduino project then this shield is for you. Comprising a 128x160 TFT colour display with 18-bit colour, a micro-SD card slot for reading/writing data and a 5-way jog switch (joystick) for menu navigation.
The TFT display uses SPI to communicate with the Arduino so is superfast. We have used the excellent 1.8 in TFT screen from Adafruit which has a wide viewing angle (unlike STN displays), high-quality colour and a high refresh rate. A full graphics library and example code for Arduino is freely available

www.hobbytronics.co.uk/arduino-tft-shield

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Raspberry Pi Serial TTL Ports


Did you know that the Raspberry Pi has drivers installed that support the FTDI FT232RL USB to Serial chip? So if you find you need to add another serial TTL port to your Raspberry Pi you can just plug in one of the above boards to a USB slot and you automatically have another serial TTL port.

Big Easy Stepper Driver


The Big Easy Driver, designed by Brian Schmalz, is a stepper motor driver board for bi-polar stepper motors up to 2A/phase. It is based on the Allegro A4983 stepper driver chip. It's the next version of the popular Easy Driver board.

Each BigEasyDriver can drive up to about 2A per phase of a bi-polar stepper motor. It is a chopper microstepping driver which defaults to 16 step microstepping mode. It can take a maximum motor drive voltage of around 35V, and includes on-board 5V/3.3V regulation, so only one supply is necessary. Although this board should be able to run most systems without active cooling, a heatsink is recommended for loads approaching 2A/phase.

www.hobbytronics.co.uk/big-easy-stepper-driver

LED Tactile Buttons


This is a range of simple LED-illuminated tactile buttons with a coloured caps. It's just like a basic tactile button, but it lights up! So now you can get visual feedback, or light up your project. These have a 12mm body and are rated for 50mA. They don't easily fit into a breadboard, but check below for a breakout board. We have these in a a variety of colors.

www.hobbytronics.co.uk/led-tactile-button-blue

LCD Backpack V2 - I2C and Serial RX


The Hobbytronics LCD Backpack is a useful little board that can be soldered onto the back of LCD’s that use the standard Hitachi HD44780 compatible interface. This allows the LCD (and backlight if fitted) to be controlled directly from a microcontroller using either the I2C interface or via a serial RX connection at baud rates from 2400 up to 115200.
This has a number of advantages
  • Reduces the minimum number of connections needed from 12 (for an LCD with backlight) to only 3 or 4 thus saving many input/output pins on the microcontroller
  • Control an LCD using virtually any microcontroller either through the I2C interface or via a serial RX connection (either in hardware or software)
  • Simplifies wiring
  • Digital control of LCD backlight brightness from off (0) to fully on (250) and any level in between
  • LCD Contrast adjustment potentiometer fitted to backpack
  • Allows the connection of multiple LCD displays to one microcontroller without additional pins.

www.hobbytronics.co.uk/i2clcd-backpack-v2

MP3 Trigger


Make some noise with your next project! The MP3 Trigger board is built to make MP3 sound integration easier than ever. The board has 18 external trigger pins that will directly trigger pre-selected MP3 tracks, and a full-duplex serial control port that provides full transport control, remote triggering for up to 256 tracks, and fast real-time volume control. MP3s are stored on FAT16 formatted SDSC or FAT32 formatted SDHC micro-SD flash memory cards. In addition, optimized code now achieves 192Kbps stereo playback from a wider range of cards than before.
The heart of the MP3 Trigger board is the Cypress PSoC CY8C29466-24SXI microcontroller which serves up MP3 data to a VLSI VS1063 audio codec IC. This version also supports an optional initialization file that can be used to set the serial port baud rate as well as to reprogram any of the 18 trigger inputs to alternate functions, including random and sequential track selection, transport controls and even volume up/down. Each conventional trigger can be set to either allow immediate restarts, or to lock out restarts if audio is playing. Also, a new trigger filename convention provides greater flexibility in naming your MP3 tracks and makes file management easier.

www.hobbytronics.co.uk/mp3-trigger-board