Arduino vs raw PIC, Atmel etc

[rickselectricalprojects]

wow, a mind controlled robot sounds really cool,
how much does it cost in total? also what is the range of it? (as in is it wireless or not)

 

[Old Steve]

wow, a mind controlled robot sounds really cool,
how much does it cost in total? also what is the range of it? (as in is it wireless or not)

The headset cost me just under $60, used, from the US.
In the case of Spike's project, he bought a Bluetooth receiver to receive the signals from a Neurosky headset. Pretty expensive, he said, as is the Neurosky headset.
The Mindflex that I'll use, (which also uses the Neurosky chipset for processing), also uses 2.4GHz to transmit to the base unit originally, but apparently the headset's micro parses the raw data first, and doesn't send it all on to the base unit, so I'll be tacking into the Nerosky chip directly, then sending all of it's data out by way of a 433MHz APC220 RF transceiver module.
The raw data is then processed by the Arduino, using the Brain Library, and the rest is up to me.
The raw data after the Brain Library looks something like this:-

"signal strength, attention, meditation, delta, theta, low alpha, high alpha, low beta, high beta, low gamma, high gamma"

200,0,0,70022,1415627,296609,25469,7758,19291,6073,220596
200,0,0,156935,1214616,65576,66807,66404,93299,3214,115150
200,0,0,809665,189860,112964,133943,41532,31662,36654,108499

I jsut want to use the Alpha and Beta waves, to control the speed of a small motor, for starters, then go from there.
A couple of links, if you're interested:
This shows the hacking process:-
http://www.frontiernerds.com/brain-hack

And this is a series of short YouTube vids that I'm working my way through right now. There are 8 videos in all. (You'll need to view on YouTube directly to see the links to the other parts, 2 to 8.:-

So, to answer your cost question, the Arduino was $8, the headset was $60, the Arduino Brain Library was free, and the APC220 RF modules are about $20$40 a pair. The rest depends on exactly what you want to do. I'll use a PIC in the headset to send the raw data out via the APC220, then probably a PIC at the other end, after the Arduino, to control a small motor driver. PICs about $5 each.
Edit: I forgot to add - regarding range, the APC220 modules are very reliable at 50 metres, but have been known to work for up to 1km with direct line-of-sight. I use them a lot.

 

[Old Steve]

These are the wireless modules:-
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/350905532149?euid=84ea3f8ce56e49e5acdc460a4fc38dc9&cp=1

 

[rickselectricalprojects]

The headset cost me just under $60, used, from the US.
In the case of Spike's project, he bought a Bluetooth receiver to receive the signals from a Neurosky headset. Pretty expensive, he said, as is the Neurosky headset.
The Mindflex that I'll use, (which also uses the Neurosky chipset for processing), also uses 2.4GHz to transmit to the base unit originally, but apparently the headset's micro parses the raw data first, and doesn't send it all on to the base unit, so I'll be tacking into the Nerosky chip directly, then sending all of it's data out by way of a 433MHz APC220 RF transceiver module.
The raw data is then processed by the Arduino, using the Brain Library, and the rest is up to me.
The raw data from the Brain Library looks something like this:-

"signal strength, attention, meditation, delta, theta, low alpha, high alpha, low beta, high beta, low gamma, high gamma"

200,0,0,70022,1415627,296609,25469,7758,19291,6073,220596
200,0,0,156935,1214616,65576,66807,66404,93299,3214,115150
200,0,0,809665,189860,112964,133943,41532,31662,36654,108499

I jsut want to use the Alpha and Beta waves, to control the speed of a small motor, for starters, then go from there.
A couple of links, if you're interested:
This shows the hacking process:-
http://www.frontiernerds.com/brain-hack

And this is a series of short YouTube vids that I'm working my way through right now. There are 8 videos in all. (You'll need to view on YouTube directly to see the links to the other parts, 2 to 8.:-

So, to answer your cost question, the Arduino was $8, the headset was $60, the Arduino Brain Library was free, and the APC220 RF modules are about $20$40 a pair. The rest depends on exactly what you want to do. I'll use a PIC in the headset to send the raw data out via the APC220, then probably a PIC at the other end, after the Arduino, to control a small motor driver. PICs about $5 each.
Edit: I forgot to add - regarding range, the APC220 modules are very reliable at 50 metres, but have been known to work for up to 1km with direct line-of-sight. I use them a lot.

wow 50m. so (i am not trying to be silly) in theory could you put a cup of tea of coffee and tell the robot to bring the coffee to you while in bed?

 

[Old Steve]

wow 50m. so (i am not trying to be silly) in theory could you put a cup of tea of coffee and tell the robot to bring the coffee to you while in bed?

Very unlikely, with this type of system. About the best it could do is turn something on and off, or control speed of a motor. Sort of 1-channel. Also, from what I've seen, achieving the right levels of concentration and relaxation are pretty tricky. That would improve with practice, I imagine.
Just a fun little project, not too practical.

 

[Old Steve]

This is what could be done, with a sophisticated setup:-
View it directly on YouTube to avoid that annoying black bar through the centre.

 

[jayanthd]

I use Arduino but the power regulators on the Arduino boards cannot provide much current. If your design based on Arduino baord requires more current then these board will fail.

If your design doesn't require more current then you can use Arduino. mikroElektronika have Arduino UNO Click Shield and Mega Click Shield. These shields have sockets for mikroE Click boards. For example you could stack a Mega Click Shield on Arduino Mega2560 and then it can take 3 click boards and you could put a mikroE mikroSD Click, GSM3 Click and a Relay Click boards into the Mega Click shield's click sockets and make a GSM (SIM800H) based device control. You send a SMS to turn device 1 or 2 ON/OFF and the relays control the devices. The mobile number of the system and the SMS that the device have to send to owner if he/she requests the status of the device(s) can be stored in the SD Card.

You can also use FreeSoC development board with free Cypress softwares. For example if you want to design a 8 channel Tachometer, 2 channels for Low RPM and 6 channels for high RPM then you could implement 2 x 8 bit counters and 6 x 16 bit counters and a 16 bit Timer for generating 1 sec delay for counting the pulses and a UART module for outputting the RPM values and you can assign any function to any pin of the FreeSoC (It is a PSoC 5LP). You would have your own sysytem with the required features.

If you need say, 8 UART channels then you could implement it in FreeSoC.

 

[Old Steve]

I use Arduino but the power regulators on the Arduino boards cannot provide much current. If your design based on Arduino baord requires more current then these board will fail.

If your design doesn't require more current then you can use Arduino. mikroElektronika have Arduino UNO Click Shield and Mega Click Shield. These shields have sockets for mikroE Click boards. For example you could stack a Mega Click Shield on Arduino Mega2560 and then it can take 3 click boards and you could put a mikroE mikroSD Click, GSM3 Click and a Relay Click boards into the Mega Click shield's click sockets and make a GSM (SIM800H) based device control. You send a SMS to turn device 1 or 2 ON/OFF and the relays control the devices. The mobile number of the system and the SMS that the device have to send to owner if he/she requests the status of the device(s) can be stored in the SD Card.

You can also use FreeSoC development board with free Cypress softwares. For example if you want to design a 8 channel Tachometer, 2 channels for Low RPM and 6 channels for high RPM then you could implement 2 x 8 bit counters and 6 x 16 bit counters and a 16 bit Timer for generating 1 sec delay for counting the pulses and a UART module for outputting the RPM values and you can assign any function to any pin of the FreeSoC (It is a PSoC 5LP). You would have your own sysytem with the required features.

If you need say, 8 UART channels then you could implement it in FreeSoC.

I don't intend to use the original Arduino UNO board much. I'm well set up for designing and etching my own PCBs, so I'll usually make a board to take an Arduino ATMega chip with a power supply to suit the requirements of the circuit I'm building. Same goes for 'shields'. I don't intend to do much with pre-built 'shields'. I'll incorporate whatever extra components and small modules that I need into my custom PCBs.
I really only want the Arduino board for developing reasonably simple, low-current circuits anyway. And for the software and fantastic library support from 3rd party vendors.

Regarding the Arduino on-board regulator, I don't have my Arduino yet, it won't be here for a couple of weeks, but surely it's possible to ignore the on-board regulator and connect a separate 5V supply directly to the 5V rails, one that can provide enough current for the intended purpose?

The SMS bit sounds good. In one of my current projects I needed to send an SMS from a PIC to alert that an alarm sensor had been triggered, so I've used wireless comms back to the PC, which in turn sends the SMS alert. (I already needed the wireless link to the PC, and software running on the PC for monitoring alerts and giving a visual and audible warning, so it wasn't a big deal to do it that way.)

 

[rickselectricalprojects]

This is what could be done, with a sophisticated setup:-
View it directly on YouTube to avoid that annoying black bar through the centre.

Wow. It is amazing how much we have improved technology although i think you would need extreamly good concentration, so it wouldnt work very well (i would always crash it) with my adhd brain

 

[Old Steve]

Yeah mate, I think I'll have that trouble with my old brain too.
I'd hate to have my life depending on it.

As an aside, I've been giving the Virtronics Arduino Simulator a good workout today. Great learning tool, and very easy to use. Only cost me $18, too.
I can get plenty of practice while waiting for the Arduino to arrive.

 

[Old Steve]

After reading that article on burning the bootloader into an ATMega328P using the Arduino as a programmer, I laid out a small PCB to make the process easier, without needing to wire up a breadboard each time. I used a 28-pin narrow ZIF socket to avoid potentially bending pins over when inserting chips.
The quality suffered a bit during conversion to JPG for this post, but still fairly clear.
Top View:-


And a view of the tracks, from the bottom:-


I didn't go mad trying to make it extra-small. I wanted plenty of room for my hand-drawn labels on the top. It's 2.2 inches by 1.6 inches. (59mm x 41mm)

 

[Old Steve]

I forgot to add the schematic, for anyone else that might want to do the same:-

 

[rickselectricalprojects]

Yeah mate, I think I'll have that trouble with my old brain too.
I'd hate to have my life depending on it.

As an aside, I've been giving the Virtronics Arduino Simulator a good workout today. Great learning tool, and very easy to use. Only cost me $18, too.
I can get plenty of practice while waiting for the Arduino to arrive.

Yeah adhd is very annoying
Anyway with the arduino simulator if for example, you have found or created a sketch to drive a old printer stepper motor (not one of the popular ebay steppers but some only mystery motor) and the sketch has an error, will it tell you what the exact error is and how to correct it?
Also that arduino programming circuit looks very good.

 

[Old Steve]

Yeah adhd is very annoying
Anyway with the arduino simulator if for example, you have found or created a sketch to drive a old printer stepper motor (not one of the popular ebay steppers but some only mystery motor) and the sketch has an error, will it tell you what the exact error is and how to correct it?
Also that arduino programming circuit looks very good.

No. It's a pretty crude simulator, only really useful for learning the basics of Arduino commands. It clearly shows what output pins are high or low at any given moment, so it would be useful to a degree for diagnosis of that sort, and like any simulator, you can step through or run it in real time.

Mind you, I haven't delved into it too deeply yet. Just starting out.
It's pretty 'buggy', too, that's why it's only $18. It's in the early stages of development. Once it's further developed and most of the bugs are ironed out, they plan on increasing the price to around $50.
e.g. Although "Serial.begin(9600);" works fine, (defaults to 8N1), it couldn't interpret "Serial.begin(9600,SERIAL_8N2);", which compiles fine in the Arduino IDE.

Also, it doesn't find 32d-party libraries that are installed in the Arduino folders, (I learned the hard way). The *.h and *.cpp files need to either be in the folder the sketch is in, or copied to the simulator's "Libraries" folder.

Here's a screenshot:-


It's still well worth the $18 though, for beginners to learn the basics of the language.

 

[Old Steve]

Rick, I should have said, you can download a trial of the simulator for free.
Here's their web page. (An Aussie business, too.):-
http://virtronics.com.au/Simulator-for-Arduino.html

 

[Old Steve]

@rickselectricalprojects The Arduino simulator is a bit better than I thought. As I work my way through the pdf manual I'm becoming more and more impressed with it. (The manual is fairly comprehensive.)
http://virtronics.com.au/Data/Simulator for Arduino.pdf

I didn't think it had a very good way of taking stimulus input, but it does. From a stimulus file, it can take any Arduino command as input stimulus, with a parameter in uS telling it when to process the stimulus. Makes it a little more like the MPLAB simulator that I'm used to, but better in that regard.
Really good for debugging string handling routines, too, since the results can be displayed in the input/output window using Serial.print() and Serial.println(). The more that I use it, the happier I am that I forked out the $18. (I'm making a list of bugs that I come across, to send to the maker for possible future bug fixes.)
One more that I found is that when testing a small library that I wrote yesterday, the simulator didn't process multiple statements on one line. Might just be a problem with libraries. Gotta check into it some more today.

 

[chopnhack]

Thanks Rick, I appreciate the info. Good to hear that there's no loss of speed in that regard, unlike the old Basic Stamps and their tokenised, interpreted language.
Gotta get used to this new term 'sketch', too. I had to look it up yesterday.

Unlikely, as it seems the pic and atmega architecture differ. What I was going to suggest was using the hex output. I have done that with JAL to a PIC instead of ASM or C

 

[Old Steve]

Unlikely, as it seems the pic and atmega architecture differ.

I don't quite follow you. What's unlikely? (Sorry, I'm a bit slow today - too many late nights in the last week.)

What I was going to suggest was using the hex output. I have done that with JAL to a PIC instead of ASM or C

If you mean to the PIC, I always end up with a hex file to program into the PIC. All programs compile from high-level to asm to hex, whether using C or PICBasic.
A PIC only understands hex - doesn't even know what a high-level language like JAL, C or PICBasic are.

 

[Old Steve]

Now I get you chopnhack. (Told you I'm slow. )
You meant Arduino hex output. I had no idea that the Arduino software could generate hex output. I just found the "Export Compiled Binary" option under >"Sketch".
Remember, I'm brand-new to Arduino and don't even have one yet. Just the Arduino software and the Arduino simulator.

But now I have two more questions:-

Can the hex file be burnt to a chip without buying a separate programmer, just using the Arduino software?
If so, under >"Tools", >"Programmer", do I select "ArduinoISP" or "Arduino as ISP"? (I'm a bit confused on the difference between these options.)

Will it run without pre-loading the bootloader? (I'm guessing the answer is "Yes", but have to ask.)

Some guidance here would be fantastic.

 

[chopnhack]

I don't quite follow you. What's unlikely?

Hi Steve - I meant that since the architecture of the two chips are different writing code for Arduino - taking that hex and trying to burn it onto a pic would not work.