PowerQUICC™ II Pro processor with higher CPU performance, added functionality, and faster interfaces MPC8313E
ST Microelectronics STM32F103 Micorocontroller, with the high-performance, high-speed 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 core processor, executing at 90 MIPS, 512k of high access speed Flash Program Memory. Excellent alternative to any PIC or AVR controller.
Philips LPC2119 Micorocontroller, which is based on the high-performance 16/32 bit ARM7TDMI-S CPU Core, 128kb Internal Flash Program Memory
MCF51AC: Flexis™ 32-bit ColdFire® V1 Microcontroller board
Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA ready made boards in different configurations available from Digilent
Will update this list should anything else of interest pop up..
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
KXPS5 twists and turns..
So the story is like this.. i wanted to read SPI data from an accelerometer through USB. Simple enough? Not really, first I grabbed one of FTDI solutions, namely FT2232L. I quickly pieced together the following contraption..
and ventured to install FTDI driver and build a program out of a sample provided by FTDI website. Everything worked flawlessly, communication to and from the chip was taking place as expected. Outer I/O pins would light up as i wanted them to, that is until I decided to write and read a simple byte in the MPSSE mode. That is utilizing inbuilt SPI hardware support by the chip. I quickly realized that the API that is exposed by ftcspi.dll is quite clumsy for my purposes and wouldn't let me to fine tune and time the protocol as i needed. I'm yet to find a successful implementation of SPI to KXPS5 using FTDI hardware SPI solution. Of course there's always a bit bang mode where i could have software simulated the SPI but failing to launch the first time I kind of felt low pressure in the fuel pipelines to continue with FTDI. One day I saw a sample which would go something like this. SPI_PORT = byte; byte = SPI_PORT;.. I couldn't believe it was that easy to read and write to it. Of course it was a microcontroller.. yeah one of those things where code is still code, small and straight forward. I quickly (pic)ked up a microcontroller chip and build the next following contraption..
After fine tuning a few things, and putting a MCHPUSB bootloader from Microchip USB framework for PIC18 (so i can fine tune a PIC program till i drop) i fired it up, uploaded a program and saw read outs form the KXPS5.
It worked!
Next step, visualize!! I used XNA framework and the examples from Microsoft. I downloaded a free 3D model from TurboSquid spend some time debugging a few timing issues and the final result so far is like this. See it!! At least music is cool..;)
and ventured to install FTDI driver and build a program out of a sample provided by FTDI website. Everything worked flawlessly, communication to and from the chip was taking place as expected. Outer I/O pins would light up as i wanted them to, that is until I decided to write and read a simple byte in the MPSSE mode. That is utilizing inbuilt SPI hardware support by the chip. I quickly realized that the API that is exposed by ftcspi.dll is quite clumsy for my purposes and wouldn't let me to fine tune and time the protocol as i needed. I'm yet to find a successful implementation of SPI to KXPS5 using FTDI hardware SPI solution. Of course there's always a bit bang mode where i could have software simulated the SPI but failing to launch the first time I kind of felt low pressure in the fuel pipelines to continue with FTDI. One day I saw a sample which would go something like this. SPI_PORT = byte; byte = SPI_PORT;.. I couldn't believe it was that easy to read and write to it. Of course it was a microcontroller.. yeah one of those things where code is still code, small and straight forward. I quickly (pic)ked up a microcontroller chip and build the next following contraption..
After fine tuning a few things, and putting a MCHPUSB bootloader from Microchip USB framework for PIC18 (so i can fine tune a PIC program till i drop) i fired it up, uploaded a program and saw read outs form the KXPS5.
It worked!Next step, visualize!! I used XNA framework and the examples from Microsoft. I downloaded a free 3D model from TurboSquid spend some time debugging a few timing issues and the final result so far is like this. See it!! At least music is cool..;)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)