Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Switch to Arduino

Just when I thought the hardware part of this project was finished, as I turned to the software part of it, I discovered that the Velleman IO kit I used is way too slow for what I'm trying to do. It takes around 1whole second to read and write all the data (24 bytes in, 40 bytes out). This is way too slow; it means that a change in the switch settings will be reflected by the lamps up to two seconds later. It also means that pushing a pushbutton for less than a full second might not be picked up. Grr....

So, over to plan B, which is to use an arduino. With the proper cables, it should just plug into the electronics kit like the Velleman K8060 did. I'll use it with the Ethernet shield, so the console pannel can use a network connection to the emulator pc rather than USB. With the Arduino, I believe I can get the response time down to 1 millisecond.

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