TKJ Electronics

Some of you fellow readers and subscribers may have noticed the video on Youtube of our PIC-based SMS Wateralarm. I went on vacation and forgot everything about it, especially I forgot to write about it in here – so I think it’s time.

The project is a school project about Water, in the class called “Technology”. We discovered the growing problem about flooding of houses near rivers and lakes, and thought it would be a brilliant idea to invent a system that could alarm the owners by an SMS, if flooding should occour.
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Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Application you used the part in: Evaluation of PIC32 USB Starter Kit II
Was everything in the box required?: Yes
What were the biggest problems encountered?: It requires some time to find the sufficient examples, and unfortunately most of the examples are pre-compiled HEX-files, so it is impossible to change something in the demos.
Though it is possible to find the same demos in the Microchip Application Library, it’s difficult to get theese working together with the Multimedia Expansion Board.

Scoring
Product Performed to Expectations: 10
Specifications were sufficient to design with: 8
Demo Software was of good quality: 8
Demo was easy to use: 7
Support materials were available: 8
The price to performance ratio was good: 9
TotalScore: 50

Prelude
In this review I will be demonstrating and reviewing the PIC32 Multimedia Expansion board. This is a expansion product from Microchip, which extends the capabilities of their PIC32 Starter Kits. In the end you will find my conclusion, whether you should buy this board or not.
In the following review, the Multimedia Expansion board will be called MEB board.
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While cleaning up my computer files I stumbled over this schematic, which I used in the early stage of the USB LED Matrix development, and I thought it might be usefull to others.

NOTE: Please add yourself to our new maling-list. In there you will get exclusive information about this project, beta-testing, pre-releases and much more – http://elec.tkjweb.dk/matrix/

In March is designed a USB LED Matrix board which I afterwards got manufactured at BatchPCB.

After about a month I recieved the board, but unfortunately it had some manufacturing defects. I contacted BatchPCB and got a full refund.
You can read more about the defects in one of my other posts. But now I’ve fixed the defects using a razor blade and some wire.

Here is some assembly pictures…

After a couple of hours programming I’m able to control the display using a nice GUI on the computer (made in Visual Basic 6). The programming is done in PicBasic Pro, and the flashing of the PIC18F2550 is easily done via USB, as I’ve installed Microchip’s PICDEM FS USB Bootloader on the chip.

After my last success with the Serial TV, I’ve got the idea making it possible for you to the television using a browser.

I’m still using my Serial TV, but now it’s connected to an Arduino instead of the computer. The Arduino has an Ethernet Shield on top, and it’s programmed to make a homepage with a text-field and a submit button!

Here is some pictures of the project:

Finally I’ve finished my Serial TV project.
It uses a PIC18F4620 running 32 Mhz (8 Mhz crystal + HS PLL), so I’m using the EasyPIC5 for the testing. It is also possible to use other PIC’s, but the available TV Pixel lines will be reduced, caused by the limited RAM.

First I’m going to give alot of the credit to Bruno from Micro-Examples, as I’ve used his PAL TV Code: http://www.micro-examples.com/public/microex-navig/doc/089-pic-pal-tv

Then I’ve wrote some extra code, to make it possible, to write text strings to the television, via a serial communication.

You can download the MikroC project here: Serial TV – MikroC

Here is some pictures of the project:

Yesterday i started my development with Microchips 24FC1025 EEPROM.
I have successfully connected one 24FC1025 to the PIC16F877A, but i will try and connect 4 of them, which is the maximum.

I’ve also got my SD Card holder soldered so i could use it. I’ve connected the SD Card to the PIC18F452 and made some code in mikroBasic, using their SD library. I’ve successfully made a logging code, and a piture manager.