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Return to Freerunner Navigation Board v2.
The second version of the Freerunner Navigation Board includes lots of new stuff to play with, while still providing the same feature set as the first version.
The FRNBv2 realizes all features from the first version on the top side of the PCB. The bottom side is all about further expansion. Most of these chips are not very usable without connecting additional electronics to them. I'll add detailed descriptions of what I did with them to this page.
The new ITG-3200 digital gyroscope detects rotations and measures their angular velocity. This enables the FR to be used as game controller or to improve navigation capabilities without GPS.
A magnetometer senses magnetic fields. It can be used as compass for navigation purposes or to sense fields from other magnetic sources.
A pressure sensor can be used for weather forecast or to measure the height above sea level if the pressure at sea level is known. If the height is known from other sources (e.g. GPS), the change in ambient pressure can be used to detect weather changes. This may be useful for gliding.
This chip can source or sink current for up to four LEDs with a maximum of 25mA per LED. In addition to simple on/off states it can be programmed to blink or dim individual channels or a group of channels. Since the chip does everything on its own, it will continue to work even if the host cpu suspends. This allows the often requested feature to drain the battery even faster to notify users of incoming SMS or missed phone calls by blinking a LED even if the phone is suspended. A blink frequency down to once every 10 seconds and a widely adjustable duty cycle allows for very short flashes to save battery power.
This is, well, a programmable oscillator from which one frequency output and the output enable pin are available at testpoints. My intention was to use it as 38kHz oscillator to generate the carrier frequency of common infrared remote controls. The output enable can be connected to a GPIO. After implementing a small driver, this should work as a generic remote control solution using lirc.
This is similar to the chip which was used on the FRNBv1 to digitize analog gyroscope outputs. It provides only 12 instead of 16 bits of resolution, but this should be enough for most applications. The FRNBv2 does not use it for own purposes, so it is completely under user's control.
The MPR121 from Freescale Semiconductor is a multi channel proximity capacitive touch sensor controller. Up to twelve sensor areas could be connected, but due to space restrictions, only eight channels are accessible at solder pads. It is not guaranteed that the chip will work as intended, but I think it's worth to test it.
Schematic and board layout files are available from http://chonyota.net/freerunner/FRNBv2/
Pictures of the assembled boards and more documentation (pinout, ...) will be added here.
I'm testing the individual chips as I solder them to the test boards. The progress will be documented here.
Chip | I²C address | Test Result |
---|---|---|
ITG3200 | 0x68 | |
HMC5843 | 0x1E | |
BMP085 | 0x77 | ok |
PCA9632 | 0x60 | ok |
LTC9604 | 0x17 | |
ADS1015 | 0x42 | |
MPR121 | 0x5A |
Known HW or SW Bugs
The frequency generator LTC9604 consumes about 0.5mA even if the outputs are turned off. This is not a real bug but it would be nice to turn the chip off while unused. A small modification should make it possible to use one output from the LED controller to control the power.
The board will be availabe to purchase starting from the middle of august. It comes in three tastes:
The CAB and DIY packages miss the programmable oscillator and the analog to digital converter chips because they are rather expensive (about 6€ each, depending on order quantity) and can't be used without additional electronics. If you need their functionality it's possible to add them later on because they come in leaded packages and are hand solderable.
If people want boards containing these chips in addition to everything else I will try to add another assembly option.
Update: The PCBs arrived a few days ago. They should get assembled during the next week.
If you are interested, please tell me which package you'd like to purchase.
If you don't like the package content, please specify which components you'd like to have. Depending on the response I might consider to offer two assembly variants.