See? Told you I was doing work.

So, the ingredients, consisting of (once again) what was sitting around my workbench at the time I decided to wire this up.

  • STK500 Dev Board
  • ATMega16 Processor (An ATTiny2313 would be enough for this, but I was all out of those) w/ 12mhz crystal
  • SN754410 Motor Driver (One of its last appearances, because this project really just needs a cheap ol' Power FET. It just happened to already be /on/ the breadboard when I started this)
  • Various resistors to set current for lines (Notice I've forgotten quite a few, 'cause they were on the other side of the room
  • USBTiny USB 1.1 Low Speed Firmware
  • USB Extension Cable (torn up to go to 4 pin female header)

Throw into AVR Studio, fix up settings, write a quick python script, and I've now got USB motor control, which means I've officially passed high joy in communications schemes. 'course, since this is Low Speed USB going to an 8bit processor clocked at 12mhz, I can't even get near the theoretical maximum for low speed. You can get 5k/s on a good day if you use the maximum 255 byte packet size, but I need a 1 byte packet. I can maybe get 100hz update rate, but that's still decent enough.

This will all turn into an article at some point, but I figured I'd at least share the fact that yes, development is happening.