Newbie help needed

James Fraser · 2007-10-02T20:07:09+00:00

Hi all,I hope this is the appropriate group for my query. Quite a few seemlike they might fit: automation, robotics, &c. but I choose you guys,because you're popular... (like high school all over...)For my winter fun project I was thinking about attaching some "realworld" true analog gauges to my PC. On the PC side I will do somescripting to scrape some HTML and determine how busy certain websitesare, and then adjust the needle on the gauge to match. so:Requirements:USB interface to PC,Ability to control via script, possibly via compiled executables onthe PC.Analog outputs,a gauge or three (digi-key must have some, right? Grainger, I supposeif not.)Total cost Microcontroller -> output ? or is there some way I can skip themicrocontroller?How do I begin to decide what Microcontroller and dev environment touse?Seems like there are plenty of options. I don't have a clue on what Icare about or what I don't.Recently I've been doing some high-level language stuff in VisualStudio, but I know that's over kill for the code for this project.For me, the fun of this project is really going to be on the PC side,in the code to aggregate Web info and decide what analog values togive that, so I'm trying to keep the PC to the display part of this assimple as possible.And down to the details:I'd really like this to be controllable via USB. Is that adding toomuch complication?Any help or pointers to blogs/articles/anything greatly appreciated.searches on PC USB and Gauge didn't really turn much up.James Fraser

Oct 02, 2007 21 Replies

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Jaded Hobo 18 years ago

A very easy and cheap option is to get the ready made ftdi USB to TTL level serial converters (from their online shop) and a simple AVR ATtiny2313. This part has 4 PWM's for driving the gauges, a UART to receive values for the gauges and some spare IO to flash a backlight LED. The FTDI USB adapters come with a virtual COM driver for Windows so you can control your gauges from Python, VB, Java, C++ or whatever you feel comfortable with!

Antoon

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Ulf Samuelsson 18 years ago

Seems a waste when you can do what you want in a single SAM7S321. There is easy to use USB CDC S/W which will give you that virtual COM port.

Best Regards, Ulf Samuelsson This is intended to be my personal opinion which may, or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

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