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Showing posts from January, 2012

Dell Axim Bargraph

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I had a bit of time today to experiment with Embedded Visual Basic and reasonably quickly I got this bar chart display up-and-running. The test data was coming in as a sequence of characters via a Bluetooth serial port. This is a big start of getting something working that can communicate with the Bluetooth enabled data-logging unit I've been tinkering with for months.

Opto-tachometer

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Motor sub-assembly taken from a broken Canon printer. I've seen several of these opto -tachometers (or position sensors), but I liked this one, especially as it was so easy to test. There are only 4 wires for the sensor which turned out to be +5volts, GND and 2 sensor output wires. If you look carefully you can just see the plastic disc driven by the motor which has a lot of fine black lines on it which interrupt the beam of light in the sensor. The beam is visible rather than infra-red which is handy because you can see it so that means something is working! With the motor running and one sensor connected to a multimeter set to measure frequency, I got a steady 6.3kHz and when a bit of resistance was applied (i.e. a finger and thumb) the speed reduced and the frequency with it. Handily the meter also reads duty cycle (ON/OFF ratio of the pulses) and I got 49.5%; almost 50/50 cycles. Interestingly on the other sensor wire I got... 51.5% as would be expected so I'm guessing t

Update on the touch monitor

This is tantalising... I found some data on driver chips used on these low-cost monitors and some of them have an I2C connection for sending pixel data directly to the screen. This may be to allow text or graphics overlay. Anyway the chip on my 7" screens is an AR05C-LF and there are millions of these in stock in the far east, but I can't so far find a data sheet for this chip or its sibling the AR05CA-LF. Being able to send digital pixel data via I2C directly to the screen would be, well, brilliant.