Computing stuff tied to the physical world

Posts Tagged ‘What-If’

What if the signal lines are very long?

In Hardware on Jun 19, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

This question came from figuring out how to drive an SPI chip over a few meters distance. Normally, you’re not supposed to do that: I2C and SPI in particular are designed for use on a PCB, i.e. distances in the order of dozens of centimeters at best. Fortunately, in this case speed was not an issue, so what if we simply take the clock signal way down, to say 10 KHz (50 µs on + 50 µs off). Can we create a solid SPI setup across a few meters of wiring?

To try this out, I decided to take a reel with some 70 to 80 meters of multi-core wire:

DSC_4494

Being untwisted and unshielded, this is probably as bad as it gets for signalling purposes. Then I started with a clean 10 KHz square wave of 0..5V from the signal generator:

SCR67

Here’s what happens to the signal on the signal generator side (i.e. same probe placement), when simply connecting the open wires of the above cable to signal and ground:

SCR68

This is caused by the load and the reflection of the signal on the end of that long cable. Think of it as an echo of that voltage change, propagating back and forth and colliding with the signal – causing this fairly substantial change in signal rise time and shape..

But to really see the effects, we have to also look at the signal at the other end, where it’s going to be picked up and used. I made the following setup, with three different probes:

JC's Grid, page 81

(sorry for the confusion: “B” and “M” were mixed up in this drawing)

  • YELLOW probe on the incoming signal generator end
  • MAGENTA probe on the outgoing signal
  • BLUE probe on the outgoing ground connection
  • RED is the MAGENTA minus the BLUE level (as math function)

All the vertical scales are set to the same 1V per division from now on:

SCR69

Note that there are some really strange effects in there: the magenta output signal is “ringing”, as is to be expected with such a long coil of wire and lots of stray capacitance, inductance, and resistance. But the blue “ground” level is also ringing, almost as much in fact! And the yellow input is funny, too. Let’s zoom in a bit on that rising edge:

SCR70

What does this mean for signal propagation? Well, as you can see, everything rattles and shakes in situations like these. It really makes a difference for example as to how the end is connected to power. If you use the (blue) output ground as reference, then the signal will appear as the difference (i.e. the red line), which has less extreme ringing than if you use the (magenta) output referenced to the incoming ground pin.

None of these effects are problematic at this 10 KHz signalling rate. If you need to pass signals like these, it definitely pays to A) keep the signalling rate low, B) reduce the steepness of the edges, and C) add a fairly substantial load resistance at the end of the wire (between signal and ground, say 330..1000 Ω). The reasons and details of all this will have to wait for some future posts.

What I do want to mention, is that you can actually see the speed of light in action here. Let’s zoom even further into that rising edge (sorry, blue and magenta are reversed now):

SCR78

It takes over 400 ns for the yellow rising edge to reach the other end. In vacuum, light travels some 120 meter in that amount of time – not so very different from the 80 meter or so of cable the electricity has to traverse. Pretty amazing what you can do these days, with nothing more than a signal generator, a modern oscilloscope, and a coil of wire!

What if you’re out of wireless range?

In Hardware on Jun 5, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

Ok, so you’ve got some JeeNodes up and running, all talking to each other or to a central node via the wireless RFM12B module. Or… maybe not: the signal is too weak! Now what?

There are several approaches you can try to improve wireless range:

  • optimise your existing antenna(s)
  • lower the data rate and reduce the bandwidth
  • use a more advanced type of antenna
  • use a directional antenna
  • install a repeater of some kind

Let’s go through each of these in turn.

First thing to try is to optimise the little wire “whip” antenna’s that come standard with a JeeNode. Make sure the antenna wire is 82 mm long (that’s for 868 MHz), is sticking up (or sideways) perpendicular to the board, and check that both antenna’s are pointing more or less in the same direction (but not in the direction of the other node: the RF field is circular around the wire, not on top or below).

One thing to keep in mind with these weak signals, is that salty bags of water (us people, that is) tend to absorb RF energy, so these radios work better with us out of the way. Be sure to take a step back while tweaking and hunting for the best orientation!

If that doesn’t help enough, you can do one more thing without messing with electronics or hardware: reduce the datarate of the transmitter and receiver (they have to match). See the RFM12B Command Calculator for settings you can change. To reduce the data rate by two thirds, call rf12_control(0xC614) after the call to rf12_initialize(), for example. The bad news is that you have to do this in all the nodes which communicate with each other – all the data rates have to match!

This in itself won’t extend the range by that much, but with lower data rates you can also reduce the bandwidth in the receiver (with rf12_control(0x94C2)). You can think of this approach as: speaking more slowly and listening more closely. The effects should be quite noticeable. Radio amateurs have been using this technique to get halfway around the world on mere milliwats, using a system called QRSS.

If that doesn’t give you the desired range – here are a few more tricks, but they all require extra hardware: improve the antenna, use “directional” antennas, or use a repeater.

Here’s an example of an improved omni-directional antenna design, as seen on eBay:

omni-antenna

And here’s a directional “Yagi” antenna, which needs to be aimed fairly accurately:

yagi

I haven’t tried either of these (you can build them yourself), but the omni-directional one was mentioned and described in Frank Benschop’s presentation on JeeDay. He reported getting quite good results, once all the antenna + cabling quirks were resolved.

If neither of these are an option, then the last trick you can try is to add a relay / repeater node to your network, as described in this weblog post some time ago. This will double the range if you place that node in the middle of the two nodes which can’t reach each other, but it adds some complexity to the packet addressing mechanism.

What if you’re lost on this site?

In Musings on May 29, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

With over 1300 posts on this weblog, it’s easy to get lost. Maybe you stumbled onto one of the posts after a web search, and then kept reading. Some people told me they just started reading it all from end to finish (gulp!).

It’s not always easy to follow the brain dump of a quirky Franco-Dutch maverick :)

Let me start by listing the resources related to all this JeeStuff:

  • This daily weblog is my train-of-thought, year-in, year-out. Some projects get started and never end (low-power tweaking?), others get started and never get finished (sad, but true), yet others are me going off on some tangent, and finally there are the occasional series and mini-series – diving a bit deeper into some topic, or trying to explain something (electronics, usually).
  • There’s a chronological index, which I update from time to time using a little script. It lists just the titles and the tags. It’s a quick way to see what sort of topics get covered.
  • Most post are tagged, see the “tag cloud” at the bottom of each page. Clicking on a term leads to the corresponding posts, as one (large) page. This is probably a good way to read about certain topics when you come to this web site for the first time.
  • At the bottom of each weblog page is a list of posts, grouped by month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s that useful – it’s mostly there because WordPress makes it easy to add.
  • And there’s the search field, again at the bottom of each page. It works quite well, but if your search term is too vague, you’ll get a page with a huge list of weblog posts.

Apart from this weblog, which is at jeelabs.org, there is also the community site at jeelabs.net, and the shop at jeelabs.com. It’s a bit unfortunate that they all look different, and that they all use different software packages, but that’s the way it is.

The community site contains a number of areas:

  • The café is a publik wiki, with reference materials, projects, and pointers to other related pages and sites. Note that although it’s a wiki, it is not open for editing without signing up – that’s just to keep out spammers. Everyone is welcome, cordially invited even, to participate.

  • The software I write – with the help and contributions of others – ends up on GitHub so that anyone can browse the code, see what is being added / changed / fixed over time, and also create a fork to hack on. My code tends to be MIT-licensed wherever possible, so it’s all yours to look at, learn from, re-use, whatever.

  • There is documentation at jeelabs.net/pub/docs/ for several of the more important packages and libraries on GitHub. Updating is a manual step here, so it can lag, occasionally. These pages are generated by Doxygen.

  • The hardware area lists all the products which have escaped from JeeLabs, and are ending up all over the world. It’s a reference area, which should be the final word on what each product is and isn’t.

  • There are several forums for discussion, making suggestions, asking questions, and posting notes about anything somehow related (or at least relevant) to JeeLabs.

  • For real-time discussion, there’s a #jeelabs IRC channel, though I rarely leave my IRC client running very long. Doesn’t seem to be used much, but it’s there to be used.

If you’re new to electronics, you could go through the series called Easy electrons. For a write-up about setting up a sensor network at home, see the Dive Into JeeNodes series.

What else? Let me know, please. I find it very hard to get in the mindset of someone reaching this site for the first time. If you are lost, chances are that others will be too – so any tips and suggestions on how to improve this site for new visitors would be a big help.

You can always reach me via the info listed on the “About” page.

What if the sun doesn’t shine?

In Musings on May 22, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

Slightly different question this time – not so much about investigating, but about coming up with some ideas. Because, now that solar energy is being collected here at JeeLabs and winter is over, there’s a fairly obvious pattern appearing:

Screen Shot 2013-05-14 at 12.47.42

Surplus solar energy during the day, but none in the evenings and at night for cooking + lighting (it looks like the heater is still kicking in at the end of the day, BTW).

This particular example shows that the amount of surplus energy would be more or less what’s needed in the evening – if only there were a way to store this energy for 6 hours…

Looking at some counters over that same period, I can see that the amount of energy is about 2.5 kWh. The challenge is to store this amount of energy locally. Some thoughts:

  • A 12 V lead-acid battery could be used, with 2.5 kWh corresponding to some 208 Ah.
  • But that’s a lower bound: let’s assume 90% conversion efficiency in both directions, i.e. 81% for charge + discharge (i.e. 19% losses) – we’ll now need a 257 Ah battery.
  • But the lifetime of lead-acid batteries is only good if you don’t discharge them too far. So-called deep cycle batteries are designed specifically for cases like these, where the charge/discharge is going to happen day in day out. To use them optimally, you shouldn’t discharge them over 50%, so we’ll need a battery twice as large: 514 Ah.

Let’s see… three of these 12V 230 Ah units could easily do the job:

Screen Shot 2013-05-14 at 13.14.23

Note that the cost of the batteries alone will be €2,000 and their total weight 200 kg!

There’s an interesting article about the energy shortage after the Fukushima disaster, including a good diagram about a somewhat similar issue (lowering evening peak use):

2-large-fighting-blackouts-japan-residential-pv-and-energy-storage-market-flourishing

Although driven by a much harsher reality in that article, I wouldn’t be surprised to see new “one-day storage” solutions come out of all this, usable in the rest of the world as well.

For winter-time, I suppose one could heat up a large water tank, and then re-use it for heating in the evening. Except, ehm, that there’s a lot less surplus energy in winter.

Are there any other viable “semi off-grid” options out there? A flywheel in the basement?

PS. New milestone reached yesterday: total solar production so far has caught up with the consumption here at JeeLabs during that same period (since end October, that is).

What if I turn the chip around?

In Hardware on May 8, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

Ok, you’re all excited, you’ve built some electronic circuit – either by assembling a kit, or all on a breadboard, or perhaps you’ve even go so far as to design and create a custom PCB.

Any non-trivial circuit will have polarised components on it, whether capacitors, diodes, transistors, regulators, or… the most common one in oh so many varieties: a “chip”, with 6..40 pins, or sometimes even more.

Mr. Murphy loves chips. Because sooner or later, you’ll connect one the wrong way around. Even if you know what you’re doing, sometimes the orientation marker on a chip is fairly hard to see, especially on the smaller SMD types.

So what happens if we put things in the wrong way around?

Obvious answer: it depends (on the chip).

Comforting answer: more often than not, nothing will happen, the thing will get hot, and it’ll still work fine once you fix the problem, i.e. turn the chip around and reconnect it.

The good news is that it’s not so easy to really damage most chips, with a few precautions:

  • use a “weak” power supply, i.e. one which can’t put out to much current, as current leads to heat, and heat is usually the cause of component damage – a lab power supply with adjustable “current limiting” set to a low value is a very good idea
  • keep your hands near the ON/OFF switch when powering up a circuit for the first time, keep your eyes open, and … use your nose: bad stuff due to heat often shows itself as smoke (by then, it’s often too late), and as components getting far too hot, and starting to smell a bit
  • for low-voltage circuits, and this includes almost all digital circuits: place your fingers on several of the key components right after turning power on: if you sense anything getting hot, turn off the power – NOW!
  • sensing heat is an excellent way to save a project from serious damage: we can easily tell if something heats up to 50 °C or more, yet most silicon-based chips will be able to heat up way beyond that before actually getting damaged (125..175 °C) – so as long as you turn the power off quickly enough, chances are that nothing really will break down, and chips and resistors will often start to smell – a useful warning sign!

Note that analog circuits tend to get damaged much more easily. Put a transistor the wrong way around, and it’ll probably go to never-never land the moment power is applied.

One reason digital chips are so resilient, is the fact that they are full of ESD diodes. These tend to be on each of the I/O pins of a chip, as protection against Electrostatic Discharge. Here’s what a typical I/O pin circuit on a digital chip looks like:

JC's Grid, page 72

Nothing happens under normal conditions, since the diodes are all in blocking mode. When the I/O pin voltage rises above VCC or drops below GND, however, the diodes start to conduct, while trying to remove the charge, so that the voltage levels never reach values which might damage the sensitive oxide isolation (that’s the “O” in CMOS and MOSFET).

Now have a look at what happens when a chip gets powered up with bad voltages on two of the I/O pins (the light-blue parts are not conducting and can be ignored):

JC's Grid, page 72 copy

The way to look at this is that the pin(s) with the highest voltage will start feeding into the (internal) VCC connections, and the pins with the lowest voltage will start drawing current from the (internal) GND connections. Or, to put it a different way – some I/O pins will act as VCC and GND supply lines, albeit with some internal ESD diodes in between:

JC's Grid, page 72 copy 2

In this diagram, VCC and GND are fed from pins which were not intended as such!

As you can see, the diodes now start conducting as well, drawing a certain amount of current. If these currents are not higher than the diodes can handle (usually at least a few mA per diode), then the chip will act more or less like a short to the rest of the circuit. With a bit of luck, your power supply will decide to lower its output voltage and enter “current limiting” mode. The result: nothing works, but nothing truly dramatic happens either. It just gets hot and all the voltages end up being completely wrong.

Sooo… next time you power up your new project for the first time: stay alert, use your fingers, be ready to cut power, and… relax. If it doesn’t work right away (it hardly ever does!), you’ll usually have time to figure out the problems, fix them, and get going after all.

Note that there are no guarantees (things do occasionally break), but usually it’s fixable.

What if the supply is under 3.3V?

In AVR, Hardware on May 1, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

To follow up on a great suggestion from Martyn, here’s a post about the different trade-offs and implications of running an ATmega at lower voltages.

The standard Arduino Uno, and all models before it, have always operated the ATmega at 5.0V – which used to be the standard TTL levels used in the 7400 series of chips used in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The key benefit of a single standardised voltage level being that it made it possible to combine different chips from different vendors.

To this day, even though most semiconductor logic has evolved from bipolar junction transistor to CMOS, the voltage level has often been kept at 5V, with slightly adjusted – but compatible – voltage levels for “0” and “1”, respectively.

Nowadays, chips operate at lower voltages because it leads to lower power consumption and because it is a better fit for batteries and LiPo cells. In fact, lots of new chips operate at 3.3V and will not even tolerate 5.0V.

The ATmega328p is specified to run at a very wide range, from 1.8V all the way up to 5.5V. Which is great for ultra low-power use, supporting different battery options, and even for energy harvesting scenario’ such as a solar panel charging a supercap, for example.

But there are still many trade-offs to be aware of!

The first one is the system clock rate, which is limited (see also this older post):

Screen Shot 2013-04-30 at 21.59.07

If you look closely, you’ll see that 16 MHz is out of spec for 3.3V, the way the JeeNode is running, that is. In practice, this has never caused any known problems, but lowering the voltage further might just be too much.

The good news is that it’s not really the crystal oscillator which is causing problems, but the main circuitry of the ATmega, and that there’s a very easy fix for it: when running at voltages below 3.3V, you should set the ATmega’s pre-scaler to 2, causing the system clock to run at 8 MHz. When running even lower, perhaps under 2.4 V or so, set the pre-scaler to 4, i.e. run the system clock at 4 MHz. This also explains the presence of the divide-by-8 fuse bit: when you need to start up at low voltages, you can force the ATmega to always power up with a clock pre-scaler of 8, and then adjust the pre-scaler under software control after power-up, once the voltage has been verified to be sufficient. Without this setting, an ATmega would not be able to reliably start up at 1.8V, even if it’s meant to run much faster most of the time.

Note that the RF12 driver will still work at 4 MHz, but not less: the interrupt service time will be too slow for proper operation at any slower rate.

Another important issue to be aware of when running a JeeNode at voltages under 3.3V, is that the MCP1702 voltage regulator will no longer be able to regulate the incoming voltage. It can only reduce the input voltage for regulation, so when there is no “headroom” left, the regulator will just pass whatever is left, minus a small “dropout” voltage difference. Hence its name LDO: Low-DropOut.

The problem is that all LDO regulators start consuming (i.e. wasting) more idle current in this situation. See this weblog post for the measured values – which can be substantial!

To avoid this, you should really disconnect the LDO altogether, or at least its ground pin.

A third aspect of running at lower voltages, is that you need to verify that all the parts of the circuit continue to work. This applies to sensors as well as to the RFM12B radio – which should only be operated between 2.2V and 3.8V.

Actually, some experiments a while back showed that the radio could work down to 1.85V, but I suspect that things like transmit power will be greatly reduced at such supply levels.

Lastly, when the supply voltage is lowered, you need to keep some secondary effects in mind: the ADC will operate against a lower reference voltage as well, so its scale will change. One ADC step will be just under 3.3 mV when the supply is 3.3V, but this drops to under 2.0 mV per step with a 2.0V supply.

To summarise: yes, an ATmega/ATtiny can run at voltages below 3.3V, and even an entire JeeNode can, but you need to reduce the system clock by switching the pre-scaler to 2 or 4, and you need to make sure that all parts of your setup can handle these lower voltages.

What if I mix 3.3/5.0V – part 3

In Hardware on Apr 26, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

There’s still much more to say about all this – as can be expected. One of the suggestions made in the comments was to use a few diodes in forward direction. Since these each have about 0.65V drop, three of them ought to bring down the voltage from 5.0V to 3.3V.

Time to hook up the signal generator and scope again. Be prepared for some surprises!

As I mentioned in my original post, the “official” way to handle this, is to use a “level converter” chip, which is based on some active circuitry, i.e. some transistors or MOSFETs. The resistor solutions described yesterday are less accurate, as you’ll see…

Here is a 1 MHz square wave @ 5V (yellow) feeding yesterday’s 4.7 kΩ + 10 kΩ resistive voltage divider to produce a 3.3V signal (purple):

SCR94

That’s quite a different signal coming out! A typical capacitive charge / low-pass effect.

Note that the signal generator has a ≈ 10 nS rise-time, i.e. the edges are not completely vertical, and that the Hameg scope probe has a 14 pF loading capacitance, according to the specs. So some of these effects are artefacts of this measurement setup.

Let’s raise the frequency to 10 MHz (the horizontal scale is now a very fast 10 ns/div):

SCR95

Hardly a square wave, and no well-defined 0-to-3.3V transitions either, as you can see.

Now let’s try this circuit:

JC's Grid, page 71

The reasoning being that the diodes will “drop” the voltage from its high 5V level to 3.3V:

SCR96

Quite an asymmetric effect, although lowering the resistor to 1 kΩ ought to improve it.

The above is again a 1 MHz square wave input, and here’s the same at 10 MHz:

SCR97

This final setup is so far off the desired voltage levels that it probably won’t work.

Given these outcomes, I’m inclined to stick with a single 10 kΩ resistor in series. Or perhaps drop it to 1 kΩ to get better rise and fall times. Active MOSFET-based level-shifting circuits are starting to make a lot more sense now – they exist for a reason!

What if I mix 3.3/5.0V – part 2

In Hardware on Apr 25, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the new weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

Yesterday’s post was about mixing 3.3V logic levels with 5V logic levels.

The real trouble, apart from things not working, is damaging some component, of course. And in electronics, almost all damage comes from overheating. At some point (well over 100 °C, usually), chips really do get “fried” and irrevocably damaged occasionally.

The trick is to avoid overheating. This in often easy to do by limiting the current that can flow. How do you limit the current? Simple: make sure there are some resistors in series!

But first, let’s examine what’s really going on when we connect a 5V logic “1” to an input which handles only 3.3V logic levels:

JC's Grid, page 71

On the left, the typical circuit inside a digital chip at each I/O pin. The essential ingredients are two ESD protection diodes to VCC and GND, respectively, and the MOSFET input gate.

The diodes are placed in the “blocking” direction, i.e. they normally do nothing but block the current. The MOSFET gate is a very high impedance input, essentially it acts just like a capacitor, in fact. The rest of the input circuitry can be ignored for our purposes.

So normally, input signals on such a pin just “float” and follow whatever voltage is applied. Until the voltage is too high, or too low, that is.

On the right, I’ve redrawn the exact same circuit, but “lifting” the input well above VCC level. To make this clear, I’ve drawn the input pin above the VCC pin, as an intuitive way to represent voltage as height in the diagram.

Now you can see what happens above VCC + 0.65 or so: the top diode will start to conduct in this situation. So if the input is set to 5V, and VCC is 3.3V, then the diode will become a conductor and try to pull either 5V down or 3.3V up, to reach equilibrium again.

This is a danger sign. The amount of current flowing will rise as long as these voltages are more than about 0.65 V apart. If both power supplies are very strong, there could be several amps of current – the 5V supply could even start powering the 3.3V circuit!

And that’s where the damage-through-heat comes in: a 1 A current over a diode with a 0.65 V difference leads to 0.65 W of heat being dissipated. Far more than these tiny on-chip diodes can handle. In fact, they really are only designed to carry up to a milliamp or so. The result: a “blown” on-chip diode, and since the voltage difference continues to exist, the damage will probably propagate to other diodes and components on the chip.

There are a few ways to prevent this. One is to use special “level-converter” chips, designed to take one voltage on the input, and then generate a different voltage on the output.

But there are much simpler ways to deal with such small differences, especially when the pins are all close together and on the same board:

JC's Grid, page 71

On the left, a traditional 4.7 kΩ + 10 kΩ resistive “voltage divider”, which takes one voltage and divides it down to a lower voltage. This works, but in this case we can even get by with a single resistor, as shown on the right.

The reason the single resistor works, is that current will start to flow through the diode as before, but now also through the 10 kΩ resistor. Since the circuit seeks equilibrium, in this case, there will be about 5.0 – 3.3 = 1.7 V across resistor + diode, i.e. ≈ 1 V across the resistor. With a 10 kΩ resistor, it only takes 0.1 mA of current to generate a corresponding voltage drop, so that’s when equilibrium will be reached. These current levels are completely harmless and can easily be sustained by the on-chip diode.

So there you have it: we’ve explained why direct connections might lead to overheating, and how a 1..10 kΩ resistor in series can prevent it, while still allowing the circuit to work.

All this required, was some theory and a basic understanding of the internal circuitry.

PS. These resistor solutions are sensitive to noise and capacitive loading (they act as low-pass filters), so this only works well when signal lines are short, a few cm or so. For reliable high-speed signaling over longer distances, a level-shifter chip would be a better way to go.

What if I mix 3.3V and 5V?

In Hardware on Apr 24, 2013 at 00:01

Welcome to the new weekly What-If series, also available via the Café wiki.

As you probably know, mixing 3.3V logic with 5V logic is usually a bad idea, but why and what if you need to do it anyway?

This topic is too complex for a single post, but let’s just start and see where it leads to:

  • VCC in these examples is the supply voltage, i.e. either 3.3V or 5.0V, depending on which chip we’re looking at. The goal being to connect a mix of these.

  • Digital I/O pins work by treating everything below a certain voltage as “0” and everything above another voltage as “1”. In between, the levels are undefined and could be interpreted either way, depending on temperature, stray capacitances, moon phases, who knows…

  • For the ATmega328, for example, everything between -0.5V and 0.3 x VCC is treated as “0” and everything between 0.6 x VCC and VCC+0.5V as “1”.

  • For 5V signals, that translates to: under 1.5V is “0” and over 3.0V is “1”, respectively.

  • Also relevant, is that unloaded output pins tend to be very close to the 0V and VCC ground and power supply levels, respectively.

So mixing is in fact not a problem at all for the following scenario: 3.3V levels for output signals, tied to 5V levels for the input signals. If all you need, is to read logic levels on say a 5V Arduino Uno from a 3.3V JeeNode, then just tie the signals together and you’re all set.

Connecting a 3.3V level output pin to a 5V level input pin works fine.

The problem occurs in the other direction: a “1” output on a 5V logic level is about 5V, whereas the maximum allowed input level for a “1” on a chip powered by 3.3V is 3.3+0.5, i.e. at most 3.8V.

Hooking these together without taking care of the problem will lead to problems, such as overheating chips and even smoke or fire (although this is almost impossible with simple battery- or USB-powered hookups).

Tomorrow I’ll describe the cause of these problems, along with some simple solutions.

New series – What If?

In Hardware, News, Software on Apr 23, 2013 at 00:01

Questions are very useful: “what would happen if…” is the foundation of science, after all.

Conjectures and Refutations is a famous book by the late philosopher Sir Karl Popper. I could not possibly summarise it (heck, I haven’t even read it), but what I take away from what I’ve read and heard about it, is that theories can be judged on their predictive value. A theory in itself is no more than an intellectual exercise, but its real value lies in being able to apply it to what-if questions. The stronger a theory, the better it should predict outcomes. The way to “refute” a theory, is to come up with an example where it fails. Rinse and repeat, and you’ve captured the essence of science.

Want to predict what will happen when you place a 100 Ω resistor across a 9V battery? That’s easy, given the proper theory: take Ohm’s Law (i.e. a theory which has stood the test of time), and apply it – a current of ≈ 11 90 mA will flow. Actually a bit less due to the internal resistance of the battery, which goes to show how strong theories can be refined further, leading to even more accurate predictions.

The what-if question is a great way to experiment, especially in electronics and electro-mechanics, because it lets you be prepared and avoid silly (and sometimes catastrophic) outcomes, such as a damaged component, a harmful burn, or even an explosion.

This approach lends itself to all sorts of practical questions:

  • What if I short out a 3x AA battery pack?
  • What if I connect my chip the wrong way around?
  • What if I have to use a 12V power supply instead of 5V?

But also issues as varied as:

  • What if I omit a certain component from my circuit?
  • What if I unplug the Raspberry Pi without shutting it down?
  • What if I wanted to use HouseMon in combination with MySQL?

Properly phrased, what-if questions are essential for practical experiments, and – by extension – also the key to building useful circuits and automated installations.

A useful variation of the what-if question is to help predict “bad” outcomes and estimate the risk of an experiment, such as: can shorting out my power supply cause real damage?

Starting tomorrow, I’m launching a new series on this weblog, titled “What-If Wednesday”. As far as I’m concerned, it can run as long as there are interesting questions I can answer, so please feel free to suggest lots of topics in the comments below. These weekly posts will be tagged What-If, and I’m also setting up a new wiki page to collect them all.

Sooo… please help me out folks, and send in some nice what-if questions!