“Upgraded” my FEZ Panda I board to give me access to most of the pins. I went from the typical number of Arduino pins to over 50 I/O pins and now 4 COM ports.
Original:
More Pins:
Here is the video on using the .NET Micro Framework and creating the joystick. We are going to play with the picture-in-picture feature and see how this goes. Except for the realtime debugging feature of working in .NET and Visual Studio, everything here can be done on other controllers. There is more to add, but the features get away from other microcontrollers. If interest is there I may continue on and show how to implement other features that make the code a lot easier to read and use.
Now that we can create interrupts for buttons and create read an analog device, we can combine them into a useful class. We will create a simple joystick class to interface with the Sparkfun joystick that allows the operator to push down on the joystick to trigger a button.
First thing is to breakout what the joystick really is. We have the button and 2 analog sensors (1 for each axis). The class will use the button we have already created and the xaxis analog pin. We will create another analog pin for the yaxis as well. We will reuse most of the code we have already created. Depending on the level of interest, the next few steps will show this working on the board, debugging, and converting the class to be more reusable and allow applications to be event driven.
A quick video showing how to read analog values.
Adding on to the Blinking LED video, this one adds a button to control the LED.
Short video on how to blink an LED on the .NET Micro Framework.
Here is the prototype controller. There 4 buttons to control various actions. I have code classes started for the microcontroller. I also have the protocol setup to send the data to the droid.
This is the first is a series of post for a new controller. This controller will be a hidden one, so the operator can blend into a crowd. Some background about the controller. About 2 years ago I started using Wii Nunchuks, one in each hand. I really don’t trust the system for crowded environments. The main issue is each nunchuk is a I2C device, and is designed to be the only one on the I2C network as the address is hardwired. I created a circuit to switch between the 2 devices so the microcontroller knew which nunchuk it was talking to.
I have now have moved to create my own custom controller. This series will describe the process of creating a new controller.
Here is the start:
The new logic prototypes arrived. These are designed to be as flexible as possible, allowing the builder to decided how he wants to interface with the LED matrix display board. The Matrix Driver board pictured is the IDC, SPI version of the driver board.
