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.
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:
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.
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...
Comments
just a caution. be very careful in applying 12V LED power supply to the jd_ioboard. i accidently reversed the polarity on LED power supply pin and I fried my APM2.5. The ground pin becomes common with APM2.5 via telemetry port. so be very careful when connecting LED powers upply. the best would be to use polarity type connector or a diode on the power supply ground pin of jd_ioboard. my APM2.5 was brand new and flying really good on quad. man it hurts. the jd_ioboard needs to be improved. specailly for power supply connectors to the LEDs.
Problem is that if you connect all RX/TX cables as 1:1 then radio modem will get double messages and it gets stuck. This same thing happens if you connect OSD and radio modem.
I am working to have solution for this and there will be small distribution board coming shortly that will solve it. We already have test boards and now finalizing it's design.
Problem is not in IOBoard it's more or less problem on MAVLink protocol and we have been talking about how to solve this problem in bigger scale several times on our development meetings. As MAVLink protocol does not support multipoint transmissions yet.
Bob, we are working on new release of IOBoard software that should fix this issue. There seems to be few variable problems on first our beta release for FrSky software. Hopefully on same time we can show our new FrSky display too.
Jani, I couldn't find any shipping information on your website. What kind of shopping costs do I have to expect for an I/O board or 2 to Finland? Do you by any chance have a "warehouse" here?
hey guys, always get a lot of questions on the connection of the IO Board for those who prefer a picture, here it is!
hope it's clear for all. Basically you never need to load a firmware with Arduino when you use the config tool from Jani.
The most common issue I see is lack of ground on power pass through.. yes you need to go connect it to another ground as there is not one near the top pin... but good news they are all common grounds.
I also did an optional 5V in for when I need to use it without the telemetry port to APM connected
It kind of defies the mavlink / mode purpose but sometimes just want to run it stand alone with demo code... and extra safety power in never hurts! (I know it's just an IO Board and not critical but hey it's done!)
@jbabio - re your posting of 14th Dec last - alas I have the same problem. I'm using an arduino nano to handle the Mavlink/FrSky conversion and link my APM1.4 to the D8R-II receiver. The Tx end is an Er9x with the ersky9x board.
Longitude date is fine but the Lat data is totally wrong (Lat 0025-.0382. in my case). Everything else appears to function and decode correctly.
Did you ever track down the cause of the error and maybe find a solution?
I've been looking through the jdIO software but haven't found any glaring errors so far.
Incidentally, I'm using the Arduino nano because my JD-IOBoard purchased in Dec. suffered from the 'bootloader' problem that many complained about last August. Waiting now for a resolution on that.
Simon
Christian, MAVLink software will have proper voltage information soon but working with original FrSky display has some limitations. and we are doing our own display for this needs. Display will be a bit bigger than FrSky FLD-02. First prototypes are already done and working but we wait until second generation is ready.
F11, waiting PCBs to come from factory so soon.
Stefano where was that solder bridge?
Jani, I'm waiting to place an order with you for a few things. Do you know when your gizmo for connecting all our mavlink devices is going to be ready to order?
is there already a plan, when JD-IO-Board Mavlink-Frsky conversion will include Voltage/Current from APM-Sensors (e.g. AttoPilot)?
I saw that current version has prepared some code fragments, but they are commented out, since they seem not to be ready yet...
regards,
Christian
Hello jbabio,
look at this,
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/er9x-frsky-firmware-what-is-displ...
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