Computing stuff tied to the physical world

Plug Panel 1 is in!

In Hardware on Sep 18, 2009 at 00:01

Woohoo, got my 10 prototype boards with 6 plugs and 2 connector boards in:

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Already, several major and minor issues have appeared. I’ll report here as I investigate exactly how good or bad all these tiny boards have come out.

Here’s a first one, the Blink Plug:

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The header has been soldered flat and on the bottom side, so that through-hole pins are raised slightly above the base level. This is a convention I intend to use for all plugs: male, flat, bottom-side, left. And with I2C daisy-chainable plugs: an optional female header on the right.

Here’s a silly way to use the plug… on an Arduino!

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(apologies for the ugly flash picture)

The “port” header is pushed into Arduino pins 8 through 13. A trick is used to supply power via the I/O lines:

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This demo sketch is available here as “arblink.pde”.

Note that with this very simple Blink Plug, pressing a button always turns its LED on. The proper LED state is restored once the button is released.

  1. Good job. A question a bit off topic: how do you generate the code images? Can they include more than a screen-length of code? Thanks.

    • It’s simply a screen shot of my TextMate code editor. For code larger than one screen, I usually collapse the less important parts – and put the full code somewhere on the web for downloading.

      The screen shot is of no use for copy-and-paste but it is easier to read, I think.

  2. Thanks. Never heard of or used TextMate. It seems to be a Mac tool only. Screenshots look very cool.

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