Quote:
Originally Posted by Gdeaver
You might want to look at Cypress Semi for their color LED controller solution. They have a demo board with a PSOC micro controller, LED driver, and 3 primary color high brightness LEDs. It's 149$. May seam like allot but its a complete kit to experiment with generating a wide spectrum of color with LEDs. The Cypress PSOC micro controllers are different than PICs. Cypress has allot of app notes to get one up to speed on their form of micro controller. They have a neat programming environment called PSOC express. It's graphic drag and drop programming. It includes a state machine builder that allows the coding of some very powerful algorithms. I recently bought one of their evaluation boards and really liked the Cypress system.
Here is a link
http://www.cypress.com/ez-color/index.jsp |
Seconded. PSoCs rock, especially their capsense (capacitive sensor) models.
Don't be put off by "graphical environment". Basically the PSoC is a two part chip - 1 part microprocessor, 1 part reprogrammable hardware. The micro gets coded up in C. The rest gets coded up graphically.
What is this stuff he speaks of? Well, it is somewhere between pure FPGA and set hardware. Each chip gets some number of blocks that can be set up to do specific tasks. As an example, a digital block might be a serial port, SPI driver, I2C port, Timer/PWM/Counter, Random Number Generator, or a CRC checker. An analog block can be as simple as an A/D, or it can do some really cool switched capacitor analog filtering (way too much rock for just one hand!). Also, the capacitive sensing truely rocks - attach a bit of copper the size of your finger to a pin, and it is a button.
While not as flexible as a true gate array, you do get the benefit of doing some stuff in hardware.
Give them a shot!