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News, Tips, & Products | ISSUE
#38 | | |  | | | | EDITOR’S NOTE | ECO-FRIENDLY HOME AUTOMATION CONTROLLER
Featuring Household Monitoring, Data Logging, and Cloud Connectivity
The 2012 DesignSpark chipKit Challenge invited engineers from around the world to submit eco-friendly projects using the Digilent chipKIT Max32 development board. Manuel Iglesias Abbatemarco of Venezuela won honorable mention with his autonomous home automation controller.
“Since the contest, I have made some additions to the system,” Abbatemarco says in his Circuit Cellar May issue article describing the project. “The device’s aim is uninterrupted household monitoring and control.”
Abbatemarco’s design enables users to monitor and control household devices and to log and upload temperature, humidity, and energy-use sensor data to "the cloud.” He describes his full project, including his post-contest addition of a web server, in the May issue.
You can also learn more about his overall design, power management board, and wireless board on Circuit Cellar’s website.
The system, built around the chipKIT Arduino-compatible board, connects to Abbatemarco’s custom-made “chipSOLAR” board, which uses a solar panel and two rechargeable lithium-ion (Li-on) cells to provide continuous power. A "chipWIRELESS" board integrating a quad-band GSM/GPRS modem, an XBee socket, an SD card connector, and a real-time clock and calendar (RTCC) enables home sensor and cloud connectivity.
Mary Wilson | Circuit Cellar
| | |  | | | DID YOU KNOW?
This month marks 50 years since the invention of BASIC, the simplified programming language that made computing accessible to everyone. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. “People who absolutely never would have engaged with the computer before were now engaging with computers on campus,” Dan Rockmore, a Dartmouth mathematics and computer science professor, told NPR in a recent interview. Rockmore also recalled his first encounter with BASIC as a high school student: “I'm almost sure that I wrote a program to play poker.” | | | | A SIMPLE COMMAND INTERFACE | How to Use the Atmel AVR Butterfly to Parse and Execute Remote Commands
 John Peck, a test engineer at Knowles Electronics in Itasca, IL, has used ASCII interfaces to test equipment since he was a graduate student.
“I love test equipment with open, well-documented, ASCII command sets,” he says. “The plain text commands give a complicated instrument a familiar interface, and an easy way to automate measurements.”
So when Peck needed to automate the process of reading his ultrasonic range finder’s voltage output, he wanted an ASCII interface to a voltmeter. He also wanted the meter to convert volts into distance, so he added an Atmel AVR Butterfly microcontroller into the mix. “I thought it would be easy to give it a plain text interface to a PC,” he says.
The project became more involved than he expected. But ultimately, Peck says, he came up came up with “a simple command interface that’s easy to customize and extend. It’s not at the level of a commercial instrument, but it works well for sending a few commands and getting some data back.”
If you would like to learn how to send commands from a PC to the AVR Butterfly and the basics of using the credit card-sized, single-board microcontroller to recognize, parse, and execute remote commands, read Peck’s article about his project in Circuit Cellar’s May issue. Or check out Circuit Cellar’s website for more details about the project.
| | | | | | | | EE TIP #127 | | Spotlight |  Build an Adequate Test Bench
If you’re like most engineers, you can hardly wait to connect a new board to your power supply and test equipment.
“But due to our haste, the result is usually a PCB under test lying on a crowded workbench in the middle of a mesh of test cables, alligator clamps, prototyping boards, and other probes,” Circuit Cellar columnist Robert Lacoste says in EE Tip #127. “Experience shows that the probability of a short circuit or mismatched connection is high during this phase of engineering excitement.”
Lacoste’s advice? Take your time.
“Prepare a real test bench to which you can connect your board,” he says. “It could be as simple as a clean desk with properly labeled wires, but you might also need to anticipate the design of a test PCB in order to simplify the cabling.”
For more advice and a photo of Lacoste’s workspace, check out EE Tip #127. You can also find photos and descriptions here of the personal workbenches of nearly 30 other electronics engineers, designers, and DIYers from around the world.
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| | | | | EMBEDDED SYSTEMS AND ELECTRONICS NEWS | | | | | | ELEKTOR.LABS |  A Moving-Dot Display Driver
This simple circuit creates a moving dot display from a voltage. Its purposes are similar to those of the Texas Instruments LM3914 display driver, which shows an analog signal’s magnitude. But this circuit has a programmable voltage divider, so it is not limited to linear or logarithmic scales. Four comparators cut the input signal range into five subranges. An LED lights up when the input falls into the corresponding subrange, but the LEDs in the subranges below will remain off (i.e., only one LED will light up at any time).
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