Arduino Pro – Engineer On The Loose

Software for the Sparkfun LED bargraph breakout kit

Jan 302014

One of the cool things about buying a widget from Sparkfun, or Adafruit, or Pololu is that almost invariably there is some reference software posted with the product to get you off the ground immediately.

For the Sparkfun LED bargraph kit the reference code can be downloaded from the product page or directly from Sparkfun’s github repo.

The reference software comes with examples that demonstrate multiple ways of driving the LEDs. Here are a couple videos demonstrating the setup and Sparkfun’s demo code putting the bargraph breakout through it’s paces.

This is with no additional coding. Build the LED bargraph display, wire it up to the Arduino SPI, download the Sparkfun bargraph demo library, upload the example code, and sit back and watch the light show.

A different project I am working on needs a display with the feel of an analog VU style meter. I need to monitor a continuous variable and display feedback to a user of the variables relative value between it’s min and max. It was a short step from Sparkfun’s demo code to a display just like I need.

I wrote some quick demo code to read an analog input and map the read values to a set of LEDs on the bargraph display. I forked Sparkfun’s github repo for the bargraph kit and added my additional example code. You can pull the analog input to VU meter display demo from my github bargraph repo.

Here are some videos showing the setup and display of a read analog value in bar and dot modes.

This is exactly the style of display I was looking for and I think this package is going to work nicely.

Sparkfun LED Bargraph breakout kit

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Jan 282014

I’m in the middle of a project that would benefit from an analog style display. Something to visualize an approximate value, within a min and max range, simply and clearly.

I like to browse Sparkfun’s inventory when I’m looking for new or interesting widgets. They are hometown boys (at least if your hometown is Boulder, CO), they make a range of interesting products, and being local it is easy to order and pickup parts the same day. And it turns out Sparkfun makes a nice LED bargraph breakout kit that looks like just what I’m looking for.

Fully assembled the display is supposed to look like this

The kit consists of a carrier pcb, four 8 bit serial to parallel shift registers(74HC595), some current limiting resistor packs, decoupling caps, and three 10 position LED bargraph displays. The Sparkfun kit comes with a Green, Yellow, and Red bargraph.

The Green to Yellow to Red transitions follow the typical Ok, Warning, Danger pattern. A reasonable choice by Sparkfun given no insight into their customers final designs.

When I picked up the kit I had a different application in mind. Rather than the standard transition from ok to danger I wanted more of a VU meter or power level type of display. For my application a single color for all three bargraphs makes more sense. It turns out Sparkfun sells the LED bargraphs in Blue, which is what I wanted. Each of the four colors of bargraph, Green, Yellow, Red, and Blue, are drop in replacements for the ones in the kit so you can mix and match to get the color or color ordering you want.

Eventually I want to mount this display in an enclosure with the LEDS showing and the pcb hidden. If the board is built as you would expect, all of the components firmly seated against the PCB before soldering, the LEDs do not sit very high above the shift register ICs. That means when the display is mounted either the enclosure walls need to be thin or else the LEDs will be set back in the enclosure wall. It turns out the LED bargraphs come from the factory with pretty long legs, probably around 5 mm. If you solder the LED bargraphs with the legs just through the PCB the front of the LEDs will stand off of the PCB about 12-13 mm and a good 6-7 mm above the ICs. That should give plenty of space to mount the PCB and have the LEDs mount flush to the front of an enclosure.

The kit is easy to assemble and the instructions are complete and easy to follow. The resulting display has a nice look and is easily programmed to display a variety of patterns. The kit can be assembled in under an hour and assuming you have an Arduino laying around and some jumper wires you can be displaying blinky patterns in less than 15 minutes more.

FTDI programmer for the Arduino Pro on the cheap(er)

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Dec 312013

The Arduino Pro comes with a bootloader installed, meaning it is plug and play ready to work with the Arduino environment. All you need is a way to hook it up to upload new firmware.

The Pro is a stripped down version of the Arduino UNO. One of the stripped parts is the USB to serial programming interface. Programming the Pro requires either an ISP programmer or a USB to serial translator.

The Pro brings out the standard green to black FTDI cable programming header and Sparkfun recommends their FTDI programming cable (5V) for a plug and play experience. That is all well and good but a FTDI cable is pushing a cost of $20 USD (Sparkfun’s 5V and Adafruits 3.3V). You can buy FTDI breakout boards with the same pinout for a little less, around $15 USD (Sparkfun, Adafruit). That’s better than $20 but still more than twice the cost of other options.

If you are willing to wait for the shipping from China (or you order ahead) you can get a FTDI breakout for less than half the price of the Sparkfun or Adafruit breakouts. The iTeadStudio FOCA breakout has a couple of nice features over the Sparkfun and Adafruit breakouts, and one glaring hassle. First the good, the FOCA interfaces with either 5V or 3.3V systems with the flick of a switch. The FOCA also has an XBEE footprint allowing it to be used as a USB to XBEE interface (compare to Sparkfun’s USB to XBEE board at $25). All in all a pretty nice package for $6.50 USD (as of Dec 2013).

iTeadStudio FOCA

Now for the hassle part. The pinout of the FOCA is NOT a direct crossover to the “standard” green to black programming pinout on Sparfun’s and Adafruit’s FTDI cables, and of course the pinout on the Arduino Pro.

The pinout on the Pro is green to black being reset/dtr, TX, RX, power, cts, gnd.

Sparkfun Arduino Pro

The pinout on the FOCA is power, TX, RX, gnd, dtr/reset. Not a straight across plug and play.

FOCA Pinout

Fortunately for half the price it is pretty easy to make an adapter cable. I happened to have a 6 pin to 6 pin inline cable with crimped on connectors which made it easy to move the pins around.

The pins are held in place by little plastic fingers that can be easily lifted back with the tip of an Xacto knife or dental pick, allowing each pin to be slid out of the connector and moved to a different position.

A quick shuffling of both ends of the connector, to move green to one end and black to the other end on the Pro side, and to line up power, gnd, TX, RX, and reset on the FOCA side and wa-la, a FTDI programmer for under $7.50.

Sparkfun Arduino Pro 328 – 5V/16MHz Buzzer

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Dec 292013

I picked up an Arduino Pro from Sparkfun during their cyber monday sale. The Pro is a stripped down version of an Arduino UNO for about half to a third the price. It is missing quite a few features so if you are just starting out a standard Arduino is probably a safer bet. If Arduinos are old hat the price point is pretty attractive, I picked mine up for just under $9 USD.

The Sparkfun Pro has a round footprint in the middle of the board that turns out to be meant for installation of a buzzer, specifically the Sparkfun 12mm Buzzer. This little buzzer drops right onto the board, but other than a comment from Sparkfunion Robert there is no documentation on how to mount or use the buzzer.

It turns out the Buzzer recommended is really a tiny speaker. A mag coil driving a tiny disk. The two pins connected to the mounting holes connect to the Arduino digital pins 4 and 5. It doesn’t seem to matter which direction you mount the buzzer. I happened to mount the buzzer with the words arbitrarily “up”, which resulted in the “+” side of the buzzer “down”. Down being connected to D4 and Up connected to D5.

Sparkfun Arduino Pro

Driving the buzzer is relatively simple, you just set one of the pins, D4 or D5, to an output, pinMode(4,OUTPUT) or pinMode(5,OUTPUT), and drive the other pin, 4 or 5, with a changing signal. The recommended buzzer is basically a speaker and so the input needs to be modulated to generate a sound.

The simplest code to generate a 1 second, 1 KHz tone is:

void setup() { pinMode(5,OUTPUT); tone(4, 1000, 1000); } void loop() { }

The built in Arduino example toneMelody can be easily modified to play out the buzzer.

First open the toneMelody example:

Arduino toneMelody

Modify the bolded lines and upload the sketch to the Pro:

==========================================================================

#include "pitches.h"


// notes in the melody:

int melody[] = {

  NOTE_C4, NOTE_G3,NOTE_G3, NOTE_A3, NOTE_G3,0, NOTE_B3, NOTE_C4};
// note durations: 4 = quarter note, 8 = eighth note, etc.:

int noteDurations[] = {

  4, 8, 8, 4,4,4,4,4 };
void setup() {
  pinMode(5,OUTPUT); // set the "other" buzzer pin to an output
  // iterate over the notes of the melody:

  for (int thisNote = 0; thisNote < 8; thisNote++) {

    // to calculate the note duration, take one second 
    // divided by the note type.
    //e.g. quarter note = 1000 / 4, eighth note = 1000/8, etc.
    int noteDuration = 1000/noteDurations[thisNote];

    tone(4, melody[thisNote],noteDuration); // output the tone on the "+" pin
    // to distinguish the notes, set a minimum time between them.

    // the note's duration + 30% seems to work well:

    int pauseBetweenNotes = noteDuration * 1.30;

    delay(pauseBetweenNotes);

    // stop the tone playing:
    noTone(4); // turn off the tone

  }

}

void loop() { // no need to repeat the melody. }

==========================================================================

The Arduino Pro buzzer playing the toneMelody example sounds like this: