LED selector

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I took some more photos of my ARMMITE Assembly and posted them in the Photos
section. These are better.

LEDsel.JPG (34.15 KiB) Viewed 28782 times

db9.JPG (27.9 KiB) Viewed 28782 times

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I just uploaded a block diagram of the LED Selection Board in the Files Section
that I posted pictures in the Photo Section.

It's a simple application. It reads a 0 to 3 V voltage at AD1 and selects which
LED to turn on. A DB9 to 10 pin header cable makes the external interface
simple. The 5 Volt supply for the ArmMite board is also connected through that
interface.

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The next step in this project is to develop a User Interface that runs on
Windows, and will allow me to change the selection voltages without recompiling.

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What will you use to program this ??

Will you release the source ??

don

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I'm looking at TCL to program the Windows GUI. I have no experience with TCL or
GUIs, so this will have a learning curve.

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While I like TclTk, I have to admit its syntax could be described as bizarre,
not as bad as Forth or Perl. But it does take some getting use to. It's
advantage when I started to use it 7 years ago, was it had some great tutorials
and to do some simple menus is pretty easy.

If I was starting today, there might be some better options. For BASIC users,
VB.net is free and maybe for C. I'd look at PythonTk which is more C like and
has the Tk GUI.

There is a lot murmurs about Qt from the Linux side and I expect there is a
Windows version. I hear rumblings of JavaScript too. So it's probably worth
some investigating. Keep us posted.

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I just uploaded a new version of the LED SELECTION BOARD in the Files Section.
The DB9 Connector has 9 pins and the Header has 10. Pin 10 is not used. The new
version has the correct header pin connections.

I have Visual Basic and Visual C. I am familiar with ANSI C. I have written code
in PHP, which is much like C. I guess that I should concentrate on learning VC.

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I'd suggest taking a look at VB.Net or C#, what you want to learn is the
CLR/.NET framework. C# is very much like C++, personally I think Microsoft
created it so they could publish their own C-like language, unfettered by
standards bodies.

I just uploaded a VS2010 project, with very simple ARMBasic file that echos
everything it receives on UART0. The VB.NET app demonstrates configuring and
opening a COM port, and sending/receiving data over it. (Written for/tested on
a SuperPRO, may need to be adapted to ARMite.)

File named: SerialComm.zip

Note that it contains no exception handling of any kind, so if you try to open a
port that's already open, it'll crash; if you click the Open button without
selecting a port, it'll crash, etc. It's bare-bones code.

But hopefully it'll give you a leg up on your project.


-Mark McGinty

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just happened to see this go by on one of the sites I watch slashdot.org

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/ ... index.html

some ranking of computer languages in use

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Hard to believe C is above C++; really hard to believe VB6 is way above VB.NET
(I suspect there is some ambiguity in that stat. I realize it doesn't state VB6,
but it does differentiate VB.NET.)

C is supported by a gazillion compilers on almost as many platforms, I'm sure
many of which are constrained so as to make C++ impractical, so I can somewhat
see that one.

VB6, otoh, is unsupported by MS, has no support for UAC, uses antiquated data
access technology (that has been subtly undermined "by design" in newer O/S
versions) and is in general ever-decreasingly viable.

Interesting...


-MM