After yesterday’s exploration into sending 4 bits over one I/O pin, it was easy to complete the Input Plug:

I got the silkscreen labels completely wrong, but once that was clear it all went more or less as intended.

A new “InputPlug” class has been added to the Ports library. It’s essentially still a Port, but with one extra “select(channel)” member to set the input channel from 0..15.

Note that this is called an input plug, but it’s really an analog 16-channel multiplexer in front of the AIO pin of a port. It can be used for analog input as well as digital input (just use digiRead2() i.s.o. anaRead()).

But it can also be used as output demultiplexer, even for analog (i.e. PWM) output when connected to port 2 or 3! Just keep in mind that as output, the usefulness is limited since there is no latching going on: the pin goes to high impedance, i.e. disconnects, when the channel is not selected.

One possible use as output, is to drive a set of transistors – one at a time, e.g. to multiplex a 7-segment or matrix display. By setting the AIO pin permanently to 0 (or 1), you could use the channel selection to pull one of the 16 pins down (or up).

The Input Plug is not an I2C plug – it requires a dedicated port and can’t be daisy-chained.

The following “input_demo.pde” example sketch has been added to the Ports library:

Sample output:

All inputs read out as 1023 because of the pull-up in this demo, except for one pin which I was manually connecting to a 1.5V battery in rapid succession.

Will be adding this plug to the shop shortly. See the documentation page for further details.