Sunday, June 22, 2014

A custom board for Yukari

The Loginator is a fine circuit. It is great at what it was designed for, logging. Even as a robot controller, it still spends a good chunk of time logging.

To really spiff it up as a robot controller, it needs a couple of things:

  • Two free PWM pins. PWM5 is AD6, so it is already free. PWM1 and 3 are also UART0, and PWM4 and 6 are also UART1. PWM2 is also part of SPI0, which talks to the SD card, but any GPIO can do the CS thing. All the other pins are already used, but I wouldn't mind parting with one of the I2C ports. In particular, I2C1 is used to talk to the 11DoF. It might make sense to switch that to I2C0, since SDA1 is also BSL. Then again, SDA1 and BSL don't interfere with each other. Another alternative is to give up AD7 or AD8, since I don't use the free pins much.
  • A GP2106 port. I have no complaints about the GP2106. It worked fine. It should have a port on the Loginator, either to interface with the existing breakout, or direct with the 1.8V parts on the Loginator board directly.
  • Perhaps rather than the 11DoF port, have the sensors directly attached.
An LPC2368 would go a long way towards fixing all of these things. It has 100 pins, so there is less overlap. Perhaps a Propeller would work too.

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