Re: IIGS Controlling and Sensing Ideas

[Kevin <kevin@hackaday.com>]

> So those Arduino 
> 
> boards are sold as solutions, and they are cheaper than many 
> 
> microcontroller boards of the past, but they are still way too expensive 
> 
> for a lot of the things some people seem to use them for.  So I imagine 
> 
> they are being bought by a lot of people so they can program it rather 
> 
> than solder a few parts together, and then because of the expense, the 
> 
> whole thing is then taken apart so they can reuse the board for something 
> 
> else.
> 
> 
> 
>    Michael

I agree, if you can get someone to bootload an avr chip, you can make an arduino from scratch for less than 8 bucks (or buy a bootloaded chip and cobble the rest for like 12), they sell for what? darn near 40 after tax. Also during my time at hackaday, there are so many store bought arduino's stuffed into boxes doing there thing, it really makes you wonder... is 40$ really worth 40 min of soldering?

On the other hand a guy at works wants to order a 400$ PLC to do a simple one axis stepper motor control, so as long as there are buyers, there will always be a product.

back OT, I recommend an external controller is when you control a mesh or matrix to do patterns and whatnot, what your really doing is controlling 1 light at a time (or maybe 1 row or one column)really freaking fast so your eye meshes it all together as a image, much like TV.

It really depends on your matrix 64 lights probably no problem, 1024 even with a 16Mhz AVR dedicating almost all its cycles with a serial clock at almost 800KHz I had to drop to ASM to prevent flicker. Whats a 4Mhz 16 bit machine with OS, other hardware, video, AND a program going to do? dunno

First thing to do is find lights where you can access individual bulbs instead of just being a string, once you have a hard number of how many lights you have you can make more realistic decisions.