Microcontroller GO Box

Do you have a GO BOX? Show us yours.

  • NO

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Thinking about it...

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    1

radiosparks

Active member
Our local library branch has a MakerSpace with 3D printers, Paper cutter, Button maker and coming soon, a Laser cutter/engraver. The MakerSpace is a do-it-yourself studio where everyone can discover high-tech to low-tech tools and technology to design and build projects.

Every other Saturday a multidisciplinary group get together for a “Coffee and Code” session, (Yup, free coffee from Timmy's, only in Canada eh!) There they brainstorm coding solutions. I find this much better than the forums and get results very quickly to most code issues.

Always wanted a "GO BOX" to show off the PICAXE Development board. So, I setup this box to easily deploy my microcontrollers for demonstration of code using various sensors. This is a two-tier fishing tackle, it organizes all the little bits in a very compact case.

The main power source is from a number of different capacity power banks, regular batteries or AC SMPS.

I use a second smaller aluminum case with antistatic foam to safely house the extra unmounted MCUs and semiconductors.

On a side note:

The very first microcontroller I programmed (around 1978) was the venerable RCA CDP1802 COSMAC (Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer). In this 8-bit microprocessor, data was entered as HEX encoded bytes using DMA (Direct Memory Addressing). It had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM that would forget everything you entered when the was power shut off. Later, I added a battery backup, more RAM (1KB) and a tape backup.

Yup, still have and use Windows XP SP3 running on old hardware. This doesn't mean I'm old school. MY master machine has Multiple Cores, 32GB RAM and I run VirtualBox for testing and using various LINUX distributions.

MCU_GO_BOX_20240507_1a.jpg
NOTE: The DEMO is running a 08M2 to display the control of a RGB LED using a WS2801 controller chip. My code has a logarithmic function to flash a LED like an incandescent lamp to mimic the warm-up and cool-down slope of the filament. SendDATA function code from a post Westaust55 25-11-2012.

Second Tier - It wouldn't be a very good "GO BOX" without other processors such as the Micro:BIT, Arduino, and ATtiny85.
There is also a shield with ZIF socket that allows me to burn (I mean, load via ISP) code to other Microchip processors.


MCU_GO_BOX_20240507_1b.jpg

More photos of stuff on my web site: http://radiosparks.com/projects.php?PID=39

---

Sir Isaac Newton, the famous English scientist, once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
 
Top