Ah-ha! Good deal. I was assuming that your were in school studying
electronics or microcontrollers, since you were posting to the group
from a university address. :)
Well, more and more, I think that electronics & software are extremely
useful skill sets for anyone. Well, Electronics, Software & Law. But Law
is outside the scope of discussion. :)
We have an employee here at work that joined as an intern (on a lark)
during a break from her doctoral studies in biochemistry. She liked it
so much that she stayed, changed her pending doctorate into an existing
masters and joined the company full-time as a software engineer.
-Adam
On 11/21/2013 1:18 PM, Gideon Wackers wrote:
Lets put it like this, the only programming I ever do is a bit of
LabVIEW. I'm doing a master in Bioelectronics and Nanotechnology but
although it says electronics in the name, there is not too much
"classic" electronic stuff. It mainly involves biosensor applications
and cell membrane potentials which is a completely different branch of
electronics.
That your code is not in the arduino language but Atmel already
explains a bit of my confusion. I'm going to take another look at it
and maybe a friend of mine who is a lot better at written programming
languages can help me a bit.
Op donderdag 21 november 2013 21:47:33 UTC+1 schreef Adam Jacobs:
Hi Gideon,
What are you studying at university? We're starting to get to
the point where you should be able to start figuring it out.
Definitely shouldn't look like voodoo...
Start with the Datasheet:
http://datasheets.maximintegrated.com/en/ds/MAX6921-MAX6931.pdf
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fdatasheets.maximintegrated.com%2Fen%2Fds%2FMAX6921-MAX6931.pdf&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGRtl_SODtV_fkIirNXSTrOBC7YrQ>
The datasheet tells us that the part is SPI (Serial interface),
which means it is much easier to talk to than a I2C part. I'm not
going to be able to help you with arduino, I've never used one. I
always just program the Atmel microcontroller directly and use the
part directly without the arduino bootloader/sketches business. To
each their own. One of the huge advantages of the Arduino, though,
is supposed to be the availability of community libraries to
support these parts. I would maybe look a little harder or
consider switching components to something that already has a
community library written for it. I linked you the code/schematic
to my VFD clock which uses a max6921. It's not arduino sketch, it
is atmel microcontroller C code. I think that you should be able
to figure it out.
Worst case, the arduino sketches are guaranteed to include support
for sending a command via SPI.
http://elbastl.sweb.cz/6-digit-VFD.zip
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Felbastl.sweb.cz%2F6-digit-VFD.zip&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHVYn6ZtoXr__UZsJOdqXWRVdKNrQ>
The part of the code that you should be interested in is the part
that I cribbed from Limor's IceClock. Specifically, the
spi_xfer(), vfd_send(), setdisplay(). Setdisplay will definitely
need to be modified to suit your clock, but spi_xfer and vfd_send
are the 'voodoo' that you are trying to understand. Look at the
schematic in that file to see how SPI parts are electrically
connected to the microcontroller.
-Adam
On 11/21/2013 12:11 PM, Gideon Wackers wrote:
Well after all the great help with the hardware part of the
arduino I have been looking at the code for my clock. For clarity
I thought it would be better to open a new thread just about the
software.
What I want to make is a four digit clock with IV-11 VFD's that
simply starts at 12:00 and starts running, no fancy menus or
anything. Time will be set with two buttons; Button A increases
the hours by 1, Button B increaes the minutes by 1. Pretty simply
one would say but after looking at various other peoples code
such as:
https://github.com/8163jb/VFD/blob/master/MAX6921_With_RTC/MAX6921_With_RTC.ino
<https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2F8163jb%2FVFD%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2FMAX6921_With_RTC%2FMAX6921_With_RTC.ino&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGUc_A3Csxrdw-xB8zSzj79qQB2ZQ>
http://www.vonnieda.org/tc18
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.vonnieda.org%2Ftc18&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNE-DUrHyqMq3tlB8WUhgFiRlEIzQQ>
http://learn.adafruit.com/ice-tube-clock-kit/
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Flearn.adafruit.com%2Fice-tube-clock-kit%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHf_jtyHS3FKe9_W092hhXkOjN9aA>
I am completely lost.
I do understand how to create the digit pattern in an effective
way such as shown
here:http://www.hacktronics.com/Tutorials/arduino-and-7-segment-led.html
<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hacktronics.com%2FTutorials%2Farduino-and-7-segment-led.html&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFsJItE19S7zIuGgjCoUZWhZfVBEw>
But
when I see other peoples examples, driving the MAX6921 looks like
voodoo to me. Can someone give me a hint/tip/example on how to
get going with this project?
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