Re: Talk to computers?

From: Anthony Fremont (spam_at_anywhere.com)
Date: 02/02/05 

Date: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 20:32:49 GMT

Gregory L. Hansen wrote:
> I've been thinking of playing around with computer-controlled systems.
> Just for funsies, at least at first. E.g. a robot, or a data
> acquisition system for a pendulum experiment. But I was thinking at
> first of a motor that spins something, as a toy to play with control
> systems. So to sum up my technical demands-- pretty light, I think.
>
> I think I can figure out AD/DA, and I know there are chips that take
> much of the work out of that if I don't want to roll my own. But

You know about microcontrollers, right? (PIC, AVR, 8052 etc...)

> what are some options for simply moving digital signals to and from
> the real world? I'd rather use something like USB than a sound card,
> but I
> don't know how involved that is from the hardware perspective, or what
> might be available to ease it.

My favorite way to get data from a micro (I like PICs) is to use serial
comm. You can use USB as well, but the PICs I tend to use don't have
any native USB support so I would have to get a serial/USB adapter
cable. Some people like shoving data thru the parallel port, but there
is risk involved there.

If you want to look at PIC chips, check out www.picbook.com for a nice
book (college level I suppose, but not that hard) help get you going and
a free blank circuit board for a development system. Digikey sells a
kit of parts to complete the dev board and mine cost me US$59.00, pretty
cheap for what you get IMO. The board uses an 18F452 that can run at up
to 40Mhz (~10MIPS). It also has a small LCD, an RPG, some LEDs, an LM35
temp sensor, and a 2 channel DAC chip. The PIC has built in ADC. You
can use a boot loader in the chip and upload your code with a terminal
program instead of needing to buy a seperate programmer board to flash
the PIC.

I primarily use solderless breadboards for all my tinkering.

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