- Blog entry posted in 'Uncategorised', November 08, 2008.
The students are making good progress learning C on the Junebug. Today I am changing the connectors on old PC speakers so they can be used with outside two pins on the connector at the USB end of the Junebug. I am going to use a resistor to limit the current to about 20 ma as measured with meter. That will allow the speakers to be used with one output pin or as a bridged setup. Last year we had 3 students working with speakers and the sound was horrid. I may add a few ohms for my sanity.
I have ordered small keypads that I hope to interface with PICs. They require 9 pins which is too much for the Junebug so we will be looking at using 18F2321's or better on BB's. I have made a prototype of a small target board that includes the ICSP connector. The board has pins to fit a BB. The idea is that this little boards will save some time getting various projects setup.
A while back I ordered 20 of the 24x1 line wintech LCD displays sold as LCD-111 by alltronics. They have a fine pitch connector and do not work directly with a BB. I need to solder an adaptor board to convert them to .1 inch for BB use. I also have 595's to build add on adaptors that will convert them to serial use.
3v0
AtomSoft, November 14, 2008
Great! I like the way things are moving. Students are learning and keeping interest. The PIC18F2321 seems like a great chip. I never heard of it untill now and looked up the info and wow. Im going to order some this coming Wednesday. Thanks for that lead. If i had the laser printer i would have been glad to make you some lcd converters. At least its not a major setback. Its something minor. Also the 18F2321 is nice because you can use to teach I2C and SPI hardware. Then maybe the "bit banging" of the both this way they can get a idea on how to implement the software version on pics without it such as the 18F1320. Thats when the junebug comes back in hand. Anyway keep updating here i like to here how its moving along. Great work and keep it up!
3v0, November 14, 2008
I have 2 adaptor boards for the LCD111. The first is just a pitch adjuster. The second has 2 74HC595 SOICs. I just need to find the gumption to make them. Another 28 pin pic is the 18F2585. It is a more expensive chips at $5 or $6 a pop but it has 48K Flash and 3338 bytes of ram. Short on time, need to run.
