Friday 14 September 2012

Interval Handling on Arduino

When designing devices which never reset and which need to be aware of time, one thing to beware of is the millisecond timer rolling over. According to the reference manual, this happens after about 50 days. If your device is designed to be powered on for short periods of time and happens to be on while this timer overflows, then it will fail to power off and you'll have to power-cycle it.
This little class avoids this problem by watching for the overflow and calculating the interval correctly.

Saturday 1 September 2012

USB IR Receiver


This is a little USB infrared receiver based on an original design by Ben Ryves. It pretends to be a USB keyboard and works by mapping NEC IR codes to keystrokes --- controlling the chosen application through its keyboard shortcuts. (VLC is a good choice of application because it's possible to change its shortcuts to match the ones sent by the receiver.)

I slightly simplified the hardware removing a switch which the original used to send different sets of key-codes, for two applications without programmable shortcuts. The modified circuit diagram is below.
(Note that the circuit must run at 12 MHz. I think this was due to the timing of the IR reception routine.)

I also simplified the software, removing a detection routine for the SIRCS protocol. Ben's original software is here, while my modifications are here.  The USB stack is V-USB: this is a nice simple example of getting started with it.

The software detects codes sent by a Newsky DVB-T remote control, seen below.
An easy way to discover the type of your remote control and the codes it sends, is with Ken Shirriff's handy IR library for Arduino; use the IRrecvDump sketch.