Week 8
FTDI Board
The assignment for this week was to program a board we made in the lab. I wanted to start out simply and not make a new board quite yet, so I just tried to get the hello world application onto my FTDI board using avrdude.
I downloaded Neil's example Hello World C File and make file as well as the CrossPack environment for AVR development on Macs"
I then followed the directions outlined in the notes page Unfortunately, the Python terminal wasn't playing nicely so I ended up installing a free serial monitor for Macs.
The output
Unfortunately, this week I was a little short of time and couldn't quite parse Neil's sample code.
However, to fulfill the spirit of the week and ensure I was editing some programs, I followed the lead of my fellow student, Bill Whitaker. He has significantly more coding experience than me and developed a short and sweet blink program for our sample boards.
I took his basic blink file and made it do something a little more complex, blink out the word FAB in Morse code.
My files fabmorse.c and fabmorse.c.make are in my file repository.
Datasheet
Ultimately I will be using a vacuum sensor for my final project. As such, I read a datasheet on a common sensor to prepare for this. The chip is a Freescale MPXV5050VC6T1 and available here. The datasheet is available here.
This datasheet was pretty interesting since it has both sensor details and electronic design details. The big takeaways from this include a functional range of 0 to -50kPa, so it should be able to measure a wide range of pressure differentials and from a temperature range of 0-85 C. It requires 5V and has an internal op-amp for signal amplification, which makes it easy to work with! Page 3 shows the wiring diagram, with the primary information being only 3 of the 8 pins are used. Pin 2 is the input voltage, Pin 3 is ground and Pin 4 is the output voltage.