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
Well, the point is that I don't put any load to the APM with the SN3350 drivers. The problem with the JDIO and high power LEDs is that the ULN2003 is no constant current driver. It's just a switch. Siis, if you want to run high-power-LEDs, you still need a constant current driver in addition which again brings a few problems because 3W LEDs run on 700mA. That's why I suggested, a JD-LED board with SN3350 drivers, which are constant current drivers. With those, there's no need for the ULN2003. The modulation inputs of the SN3350 can connect directly to the 328P's digital outputs.
You can use just normal bootloader for Arduino MiniPro on it. Check out this blogpost on arduino.cc http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/MiniBootloader to find out more.
Yes i saw that earlier but I would not put that much of load to APM pins as they can only handle 20mAh per pins and total of 60mAh of all load against GND pins (or was it 80mAh, i need to check that from datasheet but currently not close one now). Anyways in overall total amount was not big. That's why I originally paused on working on APM LEDs system due I hit limits and started to brown out my CPUs with just few of LEDs connected on it. So be careful. This is also one main reason why I ended up on making IOBoard.
IOBoard can drive 500mAh per each output pin and up to 42 Volts without any problems. How IOBoard work is by draining GND to Ground, that makes it more stronger than others. Also all high load pins are driven trough Darlington array that can take rather heavy loads. So all loads are based on how much that darlington chip can take load. If you burn that.. No harm done or no crashes are done. If you burn your APM.. that's it, it's done for good.
Also IOBoard can drive 3 PWM outputs simultaneously and 3 IO outputs so in total of 6 high load outputs along with TTL level outputs too.
Just had an idea and tried connecting the reset pin of the board to ground. Also nothing happened, so I'd say, the reset-logic doesn't work.
Now, THAT's good service :). If you tell me what bootloader belongs to the board, I'll try reflash it via ICSP and report back before you send a new board.
Besides, did you see my blog post about the high-power LEDs?
How about a JD-LED board which incorporates one or more SN3350 constant-current drivers connected to an ATM328P? E.g. 4 or 6 SN3350 for 4 or 6 individually controllable 3W LEDs.
@Stefan.. No ...kele, laitetaan uus tuleemaan (we ship another for you) anyways there are similar ISP connection available like in normal Arduino MiniPRO board have. All ISP pins are exposed on one side of the board.
There were some bootloader issues on first batch of IOBoards but those should be dealt already and we are now on 10th+ batch of them
@Jani:
Ei tomi! Arduino IDE says "avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0xfe" and your config tool says it cannot talk to the bootloader. I also don't see the board resetting when my PC is talking to it. If I powercyle and start the programming within 2 or so seconds, everything works fine.
I have programmed multiple MinimOSD and Arduino Pro Mini with this FTDI without problems, so my guess would be that the Reset-logic in my jdio doesn't work.
We are looking more developers for IOBoard development and others, so if you are interested to contribute your skills. Please let me know and we can organize development best way.
There are hundreds of possibilities for IOboard. Just last week we made one quick program to read PWM signals and control IO / Relay outputs with it.
But as we cannot figure all possibilities we need ideas and support from all our users to make it better.
@Mohd, we are releasing new document site later at this week and there will be more connection guides for all our boards. In generally you connect 5Pin connectors from APM to Telemetry board and continue to Telemetry modems. All other will go on those 4 pin headers that are middle of board.
@Stefan you should not need to do any powercycle for it. Just use normal Arduino IDE to upload sketches or even Mission Planner to do that and use ready made HEX files.
Now I had some time to start tinkering with my jdio 1.1...
Is there any way to program it without powercycling? It seems like the usual reset-to-bootloader function is not implemented - can't program it with a normal FTDI without powercycling and the board doesn't have a standard ICP header. That's a bit annoying.
I received my JD-IOBoard v1.1 today, cabled everything and things look somehow basically OK, but I did not figure out, how to configure/use JD-IOBoard with a X-frame type quadcopter properly.
The drawing in the Configurator shows for both front arms, "REAR" should be used? Is this a typo, or do I really have to recable something then?
thanks a lot,
christian
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