Sparkfun Arduino Day / SD-Arduino device

Sparkfun had their "Arduino Day 2014 Sale" this past weekend.  Thanks to their sale, as well as an additional $20 off thanks to Reddit Gold ($4 for one month), I was able to get a whole lot of stuff at a really good price.

So here's what I got:

• Arduino Uno R3 - I wanted a modern board with the 32u4 on it, for doing USB device enumeration type of stuff. My first thought is to put it on my C=64 keyboard, replacing the old Arduino Serial i've got on there, and turning it into a real HID keyboard.  That could be really neat.
• Two Arduino Pro Mini 3.3v - For future projects, including a super small SD interface (below) And for $3, it's a no-brainer.
• Two Arduino Pro Mini 5v - For future projects. Again. $3? No questions there...
• Two soft-power switches - I need one for my Lego RCX/Arduino project, and I figured it'd be nice to have a spare for another project.
• 5v-3.3v level converter - I've modified my old Sparkfun SD shield, which did not have level conversion, using resistor networks, and that was always a variable.  For the next time I need 3v-5v conversion, I have this thing to use, in my toolbox.
• Pack of LEDs - because why not. I needed to pad my order to $50 to be able to use the $20 off reddit coupon.
• Bunch of male and female headers, since I always seem to depleat my supply of these.  Useful thingies.

One of the things I wanted to do with the 3.3v Pro Mini was to try to make a serial-sd device as small and as inexpensive as possible, for a serial-based storage device and SD management shell project.  I did the trick of wiring up an SD-MicroSD adapter to the Arduino.  Since they're both 3.3v, i didn't need to do any conversion, so it's directly hooked up.

It was pretty straightforward wiring here. +3.3v to one pin, ground to two pins, then four data lines. Easy stuff.  The only nonconventional thing I needed to do was to wire up the FTDI connector to the RAW power input, rather than directly to VCC on the board.  My FTDI interface boards are all 5v, so that would kinda fry things.  The short red wire jumper over to the RAW input on the board means that it all gets regulated down to 3.3v, and everybody is happy.

Here's the wiring diagram:

The fun thing is, that it all fits inside of a SD Card storage case pretty neatly. (Well, not including the FTDI interface.) 

I figure that I can eventually work this in with a 2032 Lithium cell holder, RS232 adapter, and shove it into a DB-25 shell, for it to be a tiny "plug into serial port" storage device for my Tandy 102, Amiga 1000 or some other classic machine.

Building the BL-328 Computer: Part 1: Introduction and CPU

I recently decided to work on a physically small project. I decided to take the sort of ethics of the classic computer systems from the 1970s, which by design were considered what we now woud call "homebrew" and apply them to modern computing. I tried to keep things as stock and off-the-shelf as possible, so that this was easily reproducible by others.

To me, building a standard x86 PC from boards is not really in the same neighborhood of what I wanted to do here.  I want to do something with the feel of the Apple I for example.  Buying components, making wiring harnesses, writing firmware to control it, and having the primary user interface for it be a BASIC environment, much like the home computers of the 1970s and 1980s.

The name "BL-328" is taken in the same way that the TRS-80 got its name (Tandy/Radio Shack Z80 based computer.) For this, I went with "BL" signifying "BleuLlama", the nickname I use for IRC, and "328" signifying the ATMega 328 AVR microcontroller in the form of an Arduino.

I should note that Ben Heckendorn recently did a similar project, which you can watch his project on The Ben Heck Show.

To follow along with this first step, all you will need for the first step is an Arduino board, available from Adafruit, Sparkfun, Radio Shack, homemade, etc.   The one I'm using is one I bought a few years ago from Sparkfun, the Arduino Pro.

This one has the pin header on the right side there which connects to an FTDI cable to a host computer.  I will also be using this connector to power the entire system through the use of the FTDI-USB cable, AA Battery holder, or rechargable battery pack.

To start off, I took "TinyBasic" which had been ported for use on the Arduino by Michael Field, and I have since expanded upon(github project link).  I have added SD card support with loading and saving, data pin IO, as well as graphic functions specific to this project, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Downloading that project's TinyBasicPlus.ino to the Arduino will give you a Basic interface with few hundred bytes of program space free.  You can use the "Serial Monitor" which is bundled with the Arduino IDE to interact with it.

The Arduino has 13 digital IO pins, some of which can be used for pseudo-analog output through the use of PWM,  as well as 6 analog Input pins, which can also be used for Digital IO.  A simple program to print out 10 results from Analog input 3, and turn on digital output 5 is as follows: (Note, that this assumes a new feature of TinyBasicPlus, "autoconfigure" is enabled)

10 REM example program

20 DWRITE 5, HIGH

30 FOR A = 0 TO 10

40 b = AREAD 3

50 PRINT B

60 NEXT A

You can write programs that will read port pins, write to port pins, and then load and save to an SD card, if you have FileIO enabled.  The SD interface I went with from this was the SeeedStudio SD Card Shield which was reasonably priced at Radio Shack.  It is hard-configured for its "select" to be on pin 10, which is shown in the TinyBasicPlus.ino file.  You will need to comment out the #undef for fileio and SD card support, and remove the comment for the related #define.  In its current state, it uses the SD library included with the Arduino package, this uses 9k bytes of program space, which is a lot.  I need to find a smaller SD library.

Now that this is enabled, the above program could be saved out to the SD card like so:

SAVE example1.bas

And then re-loaded later like so:

LOAD example1.bas

Recently, a feature was added to TinyBasicPlus that lets programs be autoloaded when you power on.  This is especially useful if you want to write your program (or programs) in BASIC on the device itself, rather than through the Arduino IDE in C.  This is accomplished by enabling the AUTORUN feature in TinyBasicPlus.ino, and by saving your startup program as "autorun.bas".

You can go a step further and have the end of your program "chain" to another program.  That is to say, you could have it load and run another program. eg:

the file "autorun.bas":

10 PRINT "Hello"

20 CHAIN "two.bas"

the file "two.bas":

10 PRINT "World!"

20 CHAIN "autorun.bas"

This will start up, run the "autorun.bas", which will then load the "two.bas" program, which will chain to the "autorun.bas" program, forever.

Enough with the software though.  I'll now get into a bit of the hardware, namely the power system.

As mentioned before, there are a few ways we can power the system.  Currently, since the only interaction you have with it is through the serial port/FTDI interface, you'll have it powered through that, but once we bring this thing into a standalone configuration, we'll want battery power.

The first power pack is a 4AA battery pack with a switch that I picked up from Adafruit. This has the power lines wired to a 6-pin interface like the FTDI interface has.  This lets me use standard AA batteries (rechargable or not) to power the device.

Next up is a USB-based rechargable battery I picked up at the local supermarket for $20.  It's a rechargable (Lithium Ion, perhaps?) battery with Mini USB input for charging, then standard USB for output.  I could use the FTDI cable off of this, but instead, I decided to make a tiny adapter so that I can plug it directly in through the same 6 pin interface:

I have no idea how long either of these will power the system for.  I'm guessing a substantial number of hours.  I've also since made a cable that connects between the battery pack and that header, rather than that little widget pictured above, which is essentially a USB cord whose power lines are wired directly to the FTDI connector.

Using the above, you can hook up an LED to digital pin 5, and do a version of the "Blink" program included with Arduino:

the file "autorun.bas":

10 REM Basic Blinker

20 DWRITE 5, HIGH

30 DELAY 500

40 DWRITE 5, LOW

50 DELAY 500

60 GOTO 30

Then, disconnect the FTDI cable, hook up the battery, and it should blink the LED forever.

That's it for this time.  Soon, we'll convert an old Commodore 64 keyboard into an input device for the computer, add LCD modules for output, and other goodies so that we'll be able to go standalone and not need a host computer at all!