[TriEmbed] TriEmbed Digest, Vol 7, Issue 21
Charles McClelland
chip at mcclellands.org
Fri Jan 3 10:42:29 CST 2014
Pete and John,
Well, I dug out from my year-end real job workload and was able to make more progress on this project.
I have benefited greatly from your ideas and wanted to share what progress I have made:
- I built a prototype of version 3 (piezo based) using a perfboard and a few frustrating hours. The system worked so I sent it off to a trail builder in Connecticut for beta-testing. However, I realized that I cannot make many more prototypes this way - more on that below.
- I got version 4 (accelerometer based) working reliably. Though I am wondering if there are any practical limitations in how long the cable can by connecting the accelerometer to the system board - does anyone know the wire-length limitations of I2C?
- Transistor inverter - thanks for John’s suggestion, I was able to invert the interrupt from the accelerometer so a LOW signal was sent.
- Sleep - This enabled me to finally and consistently implement sleep on the Arduino. Now when the program runs, the first thing the systems does is slumber until the accelerometer detects a knock.
- Sensitivity - Had to learn a bit more than I wanted about converting decimal to hex but, implemented a potentiometer based sensitivity adjustment that then updates the registers in the accelerometer to increase / decrease sensitivity. The more I learn about these amazing devices, the better I feel about taking all your suggestions and moving this direction.
- v4 prototype - I have some interest from the Wake County parks to test this device but I do not want to solder it up on a perf board. I am not ready to go all the way to building a system board so I came up with an interim step. I am using four breakout boards from Sparkfun: accelerometer, MicroSD, Real Time Clock and the Arduino Pro Mini. I thought it would be fun to simply put all the associated components and connections on a printed circuit board. I downloaded EAGLE and taught myself how to build a board and upload to OSHPARK. Here is what I ended up with. In about three weeks, I will find out if it works - fingers crossed.
Next steps:
- More power optimization - can I tell the clock to sleep as well? batch writing to the SD card? John, I will be interested in your thoughts about the M41T62LC6F clock.
- Feedback from beta testers - perhaps a MAC/PC based way to set the clock
- Start designing a complete circuit board integrating the breakouts. Need to either learn surface mount or find a cheap low-volume contract manufacturer.
- Mesh wireless networking - got the cheap wireless radios that Bill had at the December meeting - want to try XBee and WiFi as well
- Refine the code - Look at using the standard Wire library. Also need to clean up the code I have integrated that is not written as I would like for ongoing enhancements and maintenance.
- Look at other projects now that I have seen how easy the EAGLE / OSHPARK processes - powerful stuff.
I will be traveling for work during the January meeting so I can’t make it - I hope it will be video taped.
Thanks,
Chip
On Dec 20, 2013, at 11:36 AM, triembed-request at triembed.org wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Chip's trail activity logger Re: TriEmbed Digest, Vol 7,
> Issue 16 (Pete Soper)
> 2. Re: Chip's trail activity logger Re: TriEmbed Digest, Vol 7,
> Issue 16 (John Vaughters)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:16:50 -0500
> From: Pete Soper <pete at soper.us>
> To: triembed at triembed.org
> Subject: [TriEmbed] Chip's trail activity logger Re: TriEmbed Digest,
> Vol 7, Issue 16
> Message-ID: <52B46D72.6070302 at soper.us>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"; Format="flowed"
>
>
> On 12/15/2013 11:27 PM, Charles McClelland wrote:
>> Pete,
>>
>> I think that your idea of a "start to finish" process for making a
>> printed circuit board would be fantastic. My hope is to be ready to
>> start that process in the coming month or two. I hope that in
>> addition to making the circuit smaller and more reliable, i can take
>> out some of the high costs of these "breakout" boards I have been
>> buying from Sparkfun.
>>
>
> OK.
>
>> For all,
>>
>> I have taken the advice of the group to heart and moved my trail
>> traffic counter from a Piezo electric sensor to an accelerometer - v4.
>>
>> Here are some lessons learned in this process and a couple areas where
>> I am very open to suggestions:
>> - Accelerometers are very cool. I have created sketches to
>> characterize the orientation of my board and I have a number of ideas
>> for other uses - thank you all for the suggestion.
>> - The inexpensive accelerometers like the MMA7361
>> <https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9652> suggested in a previous post
>> are all analog. I got it working but saw a few disadvantages
>> primarily that the accelerometer and Arduino need to be close to one
>> another and it tied up three analog lines which needed to be read and
>> summed to create a "trigger" for a knock.
>> - The accelerometers which have I2C communications are more expensive
>> but they added the interrupt functions I was looking for. I went with
>> the MMA8452 <https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10955> which was the
>> lowest priced but also had a "tap" sensor
> Until you need to worry about optimizing cost the difference between
> these two chips is surely noise but the convenience difference between
> the analog vs serial digital interface is immense. Although I suspect
> it isn't relevant for your app, the 8452 offers 12 bit resolution vs the
> 10 bits of the 7361 via your Atmega chip's ADCs, and it may be that
> without some signal conditioning of some sort you can't even get the
> full 10 bits.
>
>> - I could not find an inexpensive i2C real time clock which could work
>> on 3.3V. So, I am stuck with the expensive DS3234
>> <https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10160> on the SPI bus with the SD
>> Card. Any suggestions here? A 3.3V 1307 perhaps?
> I've been exploring the ST M41T62
> <http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/M41T62LC6F/497-11275-1-ND/2673274>
> which, together with a temp sensor common in microcontroller chips, can
> be calibrated to 2ppm (5 seconds a month. It can generate a 32khz square
> wave to run my processor at very low speed when that's desirable, and
> comes in two packages: a QFN-16 for use with an outboard crystal, and an
> LCC8 that has a crystal inside it.
>
> When I get caught up a bit I'm going to make small breakouts for both
> flavors of chip. Here's a rough draft
> <http://triembed.org/images/m41t62-lcc8-DRAFT.png> of one layout. I
> don't know yet if this clock is any good, but I'm going to find out. :-)
> By the way, the bypass cap in this draft is approximately the same size
> as the outboard crystal that plays with the QFN-16 version of the clock.
> (Both boards will be like this one: .4x.5 inches)
>
>> - Getting sleep to work is still an issue, turns out the at the
>> Arduino will only come out of sleep when the interrupt goes LOW and
>> the accelerometer's interrupt goes to HIGH when it is triggered. Ugh.
>> - Unless I want to put an inverter chip on the board, I may be stuck
>> here. Idle mode allows
> An inverter would not be hard.
>
> But it looks like the Sparkfun breakout for your clock brings the
> "INT/SQW" signal out. If you don't need the interrupt functionality you
> could program the SQW output to provide an alternate clock source for
> your CPU. If software can reliably switch the CPU between it's regular
> full speed clock and this much slower clock (1hz, 1, 4, or 8khz via
> software config) perhaps instead of "sleep" you could set your system to
> "comatose", where the interrupt handlers start off very slow but goose
> themselves with a clock source change as needed. The Atmega chip's
> current draw will be a direct function of the clock rate, so running at
> 8khz vs some number of mhz would translate to a large savings.
>
>> - My next "to do" is to enable batch writes to the SD Card reader and
>> see if I can put the card
> Working out power saving strategies is surely a fun of this project.
> Securely (eeprom?) buffering data until you can pump out an entire SD
> card "sector" would seem to be one way of saving a lot of power, but I
> don't know.
>> reader and clock to sleep between events to save power since my
>> Arduino has insomnia
> I'm scheming to use the MSP430G2955 which has 56kb of flash memory that
> the chip can write to with itself. And the MSP430 was designed from day
> one to run at low power. Insanely low power. My goal is to get one app
> that currently uses almost eight square inches of PCB space and six AA
> batteries down to something the size of a thumb drive and running on a
> single small lithium coin cell.
>
>>
>> Thanks again for all your help. I was able to finish my v3 board and
>> send off to a friend in Connecticut for field testing so I am making
>> progress.
> It's very exciting to follow your project with the msgs to the list and
> sharing at meetings. Keep us posted!
>
> Coincidentally I'm assembling breakout boards for the FXOS8700CQ
> accelerometer/magnetometer chip (also Freescale). With luck and a tail
> wind I may have one assembled to play with at tomorrow's meeting at
> Splatspace. (Meetup page for this meeting here
> <http://www.meetup.com/splatspace/events/155648802/>.) But I'm just
> learning what it's like to apply solder paste for a QFN-16 package. The
> first attempt was simply comical, as I couldn't keep the stencil stuck
> to the PCB and paste went through the holes and underneath the stencil,
> creating a very neat, roughly square blob over the top of the chip's pads.
>
> -Pete
>
>>
>> Chip
>>
>>
>
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 08:36:00 -0800 (PST)
> From: John Vaughters <jvaughters04 at yahoo.com>
> To: "triembed at triembed.org" <triembed at triembed.org>
> Subject: Re: [TriEmbed] Chip's trail activity logger Re: TriEmbed
> Digest, Vol 7, Issue 16
> Message-ID:
> <1387557360.61293.YahooMailNeo at web163006.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Charles,
>
> Here is a single transistor inverter. Super simple and low cost, low power.
>
> Nice work, thanks for sharing, I love the entire concept and solution.
>
> John Vaughters
>
>
>
>
> On Friday, December 20, 2013 11:17 AM, Pete Soper <pete at soper.us> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/15/2013 11:27 PM, Charles McClelland wrote:
>
> Pete,?
>>
>>
>> I think that your idea of a ?start to finish? process for making a printed circuit board would be fantastic. ?My hope is to be ready to start that process in the coming month or two. ?I hope that in addition to making the circuit smaller and more reliable, i can take out some of the high costs of these ?breakout? boards I have been buying from Sparkfun.
>>
>>
> OK.
>
>
> For all,?
>>
>>
>> I have taken the advice of the group to heart and moved my trail traffic counter from a Piezo electric sensor to an accelerometer - v4. ?
>>
>>
>> Here are some lessons learned in this process and a couple areas where I am very open to suggestions:
>> - Accelerometers are very cool. ?I have created sketches to characterize the orientation of my board and I have a number of ideas for other uses - thank you all for the suggestion.
>> - The inexpensive accelerometers like the?MMA7361?suggested in a previous post are all analog. ?I got it working but saw a few disadvantages primarily that the accelerometer and Arduino need to be close to one another and it tied up three analog lines which needed to be read and summed to create a ?trigger? for a knock.
>> - The accelerometers which have I2C communications are more expensive but they added the interrupt functions I was looking for. ?I went with the?MMA8452?which was the lowest priced but also had a ?tap? sensor
>>
> Until you need to worry about optimizing cost the difference between these two chips is surely noise but the convenience difference between the analog vs serial digital interface is immense.? Although I suspect it isn't relevant for your app, the 8452 offers 12 bit resolution vs the 10 bits of the 7361 via your Atmega chip's ADCs, and it may be that without some signal conditioning of some sort you can't even get the full 10 bits.
>
>
> - I could not find an inexpensive i2C real time clock which could work on 3.3V. ?So, I am stuck with the expensive?DS3234?on the SPI bus with the SD Card. ?Any suggestions here? ?A 3.3V 1307 perhaps?
> I've been exploring the ST M41T62 which, together with a temp sensor common in microcontroller chips, can be calibrated to 2ppm (5 seconds a month. It can generate a 32khz square wave to run my processor at very low speed when that's desirable, and comes in two packages: a QFN-16 for use with an outboard crystal, and an LCC8 that has a crystal inside it.
>
> When I get caught up a bit I'm going to make small breakouts for
> both flavors of chip. Here's a rough draft of one layout. I don't know yet if this clock is any good, but I'm going to find out. :-) By the way, the bypass cap in this draft is approximately the same size as the outboard crystal that plays with the QFN-16 version of the clock. (Both boards will be like this one: .4x.5 inches)
> ?
>
> - Getting sleep to work is still an issue, turns out the at the Arduino will only come out of sleep when the interrupt goes LOW and the accelerometer?s interrupt goes to HIGH when it is triggered. ?Ugh.
>> -?Unless I want to put an inverter chip on the board, I may be stuck here. ?Idle mode allows
> An inverter would not be hard.
>
> But it looks like the Sparkfun breakout for your clock brings the
> "INT/SQW" signal out. If you don't need the interrupt functionality
> you could program the SQW output to provide an alternate clock
> source for your CPU. If software can reliably switch the CPU between
> it's regular full speed clock and this much slower clock (1hz, 1, 4,
> or 8khz via software config) perhaps instead of "sleep" you could
> set your system to "comatose", where the interrupt handlers start
> off very slow but goose themselves with a clock source change as
> needed. The Atmega chip's current draw will be a direct function of
> the clock rate, so running at 8khz vs some number of mhz would
> translate to a large savings.
>
>
> - My next ?to do? is to enable batch writes to the SD Card reader and see if I can put the card
> Working out power saving strategies is surely a fun of this project. Securely (eeprom?) buffering data until you can pump out an entire SD card "sector" would seem to be one way of saving a lot of power, but I don't know.
>
> reader and clock to sleep between events to save power since my Arduino has insomnia
> I'm scheming to use the MSP430G2955 which has 56kb of flash memory that the chip can write to with itself. And the MSP430 was designed from day one to run at low power. Insanely low power. My goal is to get one app that currently uses almost eight square inches of PCB space and six AA batteries down to something the size of a thumb drive and running on a single small lithium coin cell.
>
>
>
>>
>> Thanks again for all your help. ?I was able to finish my v3 board and send off to a friend in Connecticut for field testing so I am making progress.
> It's very exciting to follow your project with the msgs to the list and sharing at meetings. Keep us posted!
>
> Coincidentally I'm assembling breakout boards for the FXOS8700CQ
> accelerometer/magnetometer chip (also Freescale). With luck and a
> tail wind I may have one assembled to play with at tomorrow's
> meeting at Splatspace. (Meetup page for this meeting here.) But I'm just learning what it's like to apply solder paste for a QFN-16 package. The first attempt was simply comical, as I couldn't keep the stencil stuck to the PCB and paste went through the holes and underneath the stencil, creating a very neat, roughly square blob over the top of the chip's pads.
>
> -Pete
>
>
>
>>
>> Chip
>>
>>
>>
>
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