AS-Interface Essentials

In the olden days everything was controlled using hand-made custom cabling and proprietary data formats. In the industrial world at least, however, this kind of thing is long gone: now entire systems are based instead around fully-featured bus architectures. As well as the obvious advantages of easier maintainability and expandability there are other reasons to prefer such an approach. For example, a widespread industry standard ensures the long-term availability of hardware and software components, at least to some degree. In this article we will take a look at AS-Interface.

If you've been dealing with the Arduino Uno or other 8-bit controller boards, but now need more processing power for more demanding projects, 32-bitters and professional development environments are the way forward. Taking the plunge is not as daunting as you imagined, as Elektor authors Viacheslav Gromov and Tam Hanna show in this article.

Microchip has fitted out its latest offspring with some interesting new features which will be unfamiliar to developers who have grown up with other PIC devices. In this article we will look briefly at two of these novelties: high-endurance flash (HEF), which is a region of extra-robust flash storage that the microcontroller can write to and read from; and programmable logic cells which let you configure hardware in the microcontroller, which can save a lot of code and computing resources.

It is easy for anyone whose background is in the world of industrial control to fall into one of the traps for the unwary when turning their hand to designing a circuit for use in a vehicle. This article will look at the ways in which things can go pear-shaped, and at the risks in store for designers and their hardware.

When Elektor last reported on Android Things [1][2], the operating system was still in a state of active development. Since then Google has reached a milestone in their work with the release of a version with a stable API. This article will take a quick look at what’s new. As a host we will, as before, be using a first-generation Raspberry Pi 3, and of course a Google account will be required.

A colour OLED can massively enhance a project; the integrated control chips can be addressed via SPI. Cheap 32-bit controllers, advanced libraries and user-friendly development environments make control easy, as we show in this article...

A PWM signal requires just a single digital output on an IC and so it is hardly surprising that these days the digital I/O pins of microcontrollers often come with extensive PWM capabilities. However, there are also downsides: for example, DACs are faster and more accurate. But now an IC is available that offers a simple upgrade to a PWM-based design.

The LM386 universal audio amp is, frankly, well past its sell-by date now. Its feeble performance no longer meets current expectations. With the PAM8302 the author offers an up to date alternative and explains how this amplifier chip should be connected and handled.Not every man has the desire or calling to be an audiophile, nor does everybody need an audio amplifier that can reproduce Puccini or Pavarotti in the best achievable sound quality. Yet even a process control computer (microcontroller or single-board computer) will sometimes require an audio amplifier, as for instance the author did for delivering status or warning notifications. In situations of this kind harmonic distortion is of minor significance and the key considerations are instead space requirement, simplicity, audibility, energy consumption and heat dissipation. Everything else is irrelevant.

The falling price of supercapacitors means that they can now be considered for homebrew designs and small production runs. We take a closer look at the different types of supercap and consider some of the theoretical aspects of their use. Last but not least we use a new IC designed for supercap charging.

When designing systems with microcontrollers, SoCs, LCDs and touch screens it’s often useful to incorporate a cheap Tablet or smartphone. In this sort of setup you need to think about power provision to keep the smart device charged up. Anyone starting out to make their own charger soon learns that it’s not so simple. Just connecting the charger output to ground and +5 V pins of the USB socket isn’t enough.