Steve's Things

A while back I was thinking about making a small board that would run it’s own OS and methodology for programming, similar to the computers of old such as the TRS-80 and the Commodore 64. Everything was on these machine for controlling simple tasks, video, audio and file stuff. All from the OS prompt. I always thought it’d be neat to have a microcontroller board that functioned similarly to the older computers but with IO.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the Duinomite. I stumbled across it at dontronics and after reading a bit about it, I purchased it right away.

The Duinomite is basically a single board computer with a BASIC interpreter, VGA and Composite interface and a bunch of other little features which make it so awesome. It should also be noted that this idea was done first by Geoff Graham and his unit, the MaxiMite. It seems as though Olimex and Geoff were having a bit of a fight for a while but frankly, I don’t really know. All I can say is that it’s a really neat device and I’m glad that I bought it.

Anyways, like I said, it has a basic interpreter on it. It allows you to program it with a ps2 keyboard or through the console on a virtual com port. The language itself is pretty rudimentary with no labels except for line number. No functions either. However, for simpler, less time intensive stuff, this board is ideal. Here are some screenies of the video display.

The video is pretty rudimentary, monochrome only, 324×216 or 320×200 in vga mode. It does seem to work ok though. The nice thing about this device is its easy access to a sd card so you can log data as well real easily.

anyways, I thought it was a neat device. anyways, check it out at http://www.olimex.com/dev/index.html

Data logging

As a side effect of trying this board out, I kept a couple of graphs. The first on is temperature versus time and the next is light level. I just wanted to try it out so I left it run overnight and here are the charts

I did something like this earlier, like 3 years ago. I’ve always found it neat to see such variation in a controlled environment. For example, the temperature graph shows when I closed the door to my office, the temperature dropped but you could see the furnace kicking on every 20 minutes.

Also, with the light. You can see I had the main light on. Then I turned it off. Then i left the monitor on when I left, eventually the monitor turned off and then as day broke you could see an increase in lighting.

I dunno, I think that kind of thing is cool.