| Sept. 9th |
|
Not the most exciting update this week. I spent the week planning and organising
the tutorial and this site.
I did get the concept block diagram drawn up as seen on the top page. This is something I always mean to do as a first step of a project, but this is the first time I've ever really done it, save for an illegible sketch on crumpled copy paper hear and there. It's definitely a great way to organise ideas, as well as make it look like you really know what your doing (especially with the snazzy colours). As my design is, at this point, incredibly open-ended, I've decided to make the executive decision of using and AVR microcontroller, and I will go as far as to say that I will most likely use the ATmega328; it has 32k flash (should be plenty for the UI I have in mind), UART, SPI, PWM, 6 channel 10-bit ADC, two 8- and one 16-bit timers, four I/O ports, and more. It is also fairly good in terms of power consumption, rated at 0.2mA at 1MHz with a 1.8v supply while active, and down to 0.1uA in power-down mode. With the menu-based, on-request acquisition scheme I am imagining, it would be fairly trivial to run in power-down mode and wake on pin-change interrupts from the buttons. Of course the real power consumption of this system is going to be the LCD, especially if I decide on a backlit screen. I've also noticed that these wiki pages appear to use a European spell-check, as it insists on 'organise' over 'organize' and 'colour' over 'color'. |
