Developer

jDrones News: jD-IOBoard v1.0

jDrones_IOBoard_DEMO_LED_3125_sml.JPG?width=500

 

jDrones News: jD-IOBoard v1.0 update

 

You had some problems on driving LED strips or something else?? Well no problems anymore.... We have seen people making all type of darlington/transistor and similar hacks to drive their LEDs, Sirens and so on but they all need a lot of hacking and they might not be suitable for long term solution. 

We answered on this call and made fully Arduino compatible called jD-IOBoard that can run Single LEDs, LED Strips, Loudspeakers, Buzzers, Power switches and so on. It's upto your own imagination on what all you can control with this board. 

jDrones_IOBoard_P2.jpg?width=500

So what does this board actually do?? It has fully Arduino compatible ATMEGA 328 MCU and Darlington array to driver high power outputs. Also I2C pins are exposed and same as many TTL level IO and Analog pins. As you can see from picture above. 

 

Board has:

- 6 x High power outputs, max. 500mAh / 50 Volts

- 4 x Analog inputs (6 if you don't use I2C port)

- I2C port for controlling, listening I2C messages

- 6 x TTL level GPIO pins (8 if you don't use FTDI)

- 1 x FTDI port

 

3 high power outputs can also be controlled by PWM output while another 3 are just normal "On/Off" outputs

 

 

How those Arduino pinouts looks like:

jD_IOBoard_ArduinoPINs.jpg?width=500

Connecting LED's,Buzzers etc is really simple. Just use one of output pins on end of the board. Below you can see examples on how to connect LEDs or LED Strips on it.

jD_IOBoard_GeneralConnection.png?width=500

 

jD-IOBoard-TelemConnection.png?width=500

 

Pictures does not give enough credit for how it works so we made small video to show just few examples on how to use it. There are many other ways to do it but this should give at least some idea what/how to run it. So have fun watching it.

 

Get yours from jDrones Store: jD-IOBoard and have a blink blink.

 

Ps. There are some nice features coming to this board shortly...

 

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Comments

  • Is this board supported? All i get is errors when loading anything to it.

    I can talk to it on the configurator and thats about it, anything i load via arduino just comes up as errors every time.

  • Hi Janni, I've sent an email and received no response. I'm having bootloader error. I've tried 3 different FTDI cables, Including the recommended FTDI one with latest drivers. I've loaded the bootloader multiple times on with an Arduino Uno but still cannot get Configurator/FTDI to recognise the board. I think I have a faulty board. Could you please help rectify this issue as I'd really like to get this running.

    Regards, Jeremy

  • does anyone have a how to video on how this works? I'm struggling to get this to work with pixhawk.

    I plugged in the 5 pin connector into telemetry 2 port which gave power (red light on) the IO board.

    However when I plug in the LED light to the pins, nothing happens... 

  • Jani, seems that my bootloader is corrupted. Is there any instructions to burn the bootloader? Thanks!

  • Developer

    Yes on normal FTDI cable Reset is Green. Like shown in pictures on top of this page (Pinout pictures). If you are not careful with static electricity, it can be that you have corrupted your bootloader on IOBoard. In this case you need to have Arduino board or AVR programming device to first burn bootloader to IOBoard and then you can use FTDI cable to upload new softwares.   

  • Hi Dave,  

    From the IO-Board's RST pin (top right as seen in pictures), it should go to the DTR pin on your FTDI board. I have no idea about the wire color, since my boards only have pin headers and I use my own wires.

  • So that would be the green FTDI wire to the RST contact just above the right (grn) contact on the IOBOard?
  • Hi Dave. Make sure you also connect the reset pin from FTDI to IO-Board, I couldn't make it work properly until I did that.

  • I have an IOboard that I bought in early 2013. I programmed it with the old software and it's working. I'd like to change the way it's functioning, but when I try to connect with the new configuration software, I can't connect to the boot loader. I'm running the latest FTDI drivers. I tried wading through all the threads on this problem but I am not finding a clear solution to my problem. Can someone summarize what the likely problem is and what the best solution is?
  • Hi,

    I also had a lot of issues with not being able to connect with bootloader.

    For me it all got sorted out as soon as I've connected the Reset pin to my FTDI board.

    As far as I can tell, as soon as the ioboard starts sending telemetry data or whatever it's sending by default, the configurator software is having a hard time connecting to that port. I noticed that if you keep the VCC disconnected on the board, click the "connect" button on the software, and immediately connect VCC to power up the IOBoard, it works (without needing RST pin). 

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