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|  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Circuit Cellar's ongoing mission is to provide important information to help you make smart choices with your engineering projects, from prototype to production.
Your feedback is always welcome. - Jeff Child ([email protected])
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| | Raspberry Pi HAT Serves Up Robotics Control Smorgasbord
Adafruit has released a $35 robotics HAT add-on for any 40-pin Raspberry Pi board. The Adafruit Crickit (Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit) HAT is designed for controlling motors, servos or solenoids using Python 3. The board is limited to powering 5 V devices and requires a 5 V power supply.
The Crickit HAT incorporates Adafruit's "i2c-to-whatever" bridge firmware, called seesaw. With seesaw, "you only need to use two data pins to control the huge number of inputs and outputs on the Crickit," explains Adafruit founder and MIT engineer Limor Fried in an announcement on the Raspberry Pi blog. "All those timers, PWMs, NeoPixels and sensors are offloaded to the co-processor. Stuff like managing the speed of motors via PWM is also done with the co-processor, so you'll get smooth PWM outputs that don't jitter when Linux gets busy with other stuff."
The Crickit HAT uses a "bento box" approach to robotics, says Fried. "Instead of having eight servo drivers, or four 10A motor controllers, or five stepper drivers, it has just a little bit of everything," she adds.
Cutting-Edge Embedded Vision Solutions
Clarius Mobile Health revolutionized ultrasounds. And Xilinx's technology helped get them there. The company's IoT-  connected, portable ultrasound machine leveraged Xilinx's Zynq programmable System-on-Chip (SoC) solution.
Avnet connected Clarius Mobile Health to Xilinx's technology---some of which wasn't even on the shelves yet.
Mini PCIe Expansion Card Boasts PCIe/104 OneBank Interfacd WinSystems has introduced its PX1-I416 module, which adds Mini PCI Express expansion capability to embedded systems with PCle/104 OneBank expansion. This product is designed to maximize utilization of a host platform while opening up access to myriad COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) I/O modules from a multitude of suppliers. According the company, system designers can add multiple Mini-Card I/O modules to single board computers like WinSystems' PX1-C415 without the time, costs or risks of developing proprietary designs. Compatible with PCle/104 OneBank SBCs, the module incorporates dual Mini-PCI Express slots. Up to four PX1-I416 modules can be stacked together, thereby providing support for up to eight separate Mini-Cards. The onboard PCle and USB multiplexer ensures maximum utilization of the host platform's PCI Express and USB resources on the OneBank expansion interface. Each PX1-I416 expansion module also includes a separate SIM card holder for use with cellular modems.
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High-Current PC/104 Board Delivers 48 Channels of I/O Apex Embedded Systems offers the TRACER-DIO-5VIO, a high current PC/104 digital I/O and counter/timer module. The module provides 48-lines of 8255 compatible general purpose I/O and three 16-bit 8254 compatible counter/timers. The board is a COTS module  used in military, aerospace and industrial applications. This product is an update from the company's classic Tracer-E. The digital I/O module provides true 5 V output swings and accepts full 5 V inputs. It has 48-lines of 8255 compatible general purpose I/O and three 16-bit 8254 compatible counter/timers. Optional 2 mm connectors and cables, terminal board and cable accessories are available. A tin mitigation option available via special order. Firmware modifications are available on request. |
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