Titus, Victor, Shane and anyone else interested.

[DJ88]

You may want to take a peek at this new forum on reef central. Just started today. Anyone is welcome to add in expertise or a helping hand.

Controller project. (http://www.reefcentral.com/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=145)

[DJ88]

^

important topic.. Titus we need stickies!!! lol

[titus]

Hello,

Hey Darren that's very neat but I can't do it as I'm busy with other stuff. Once I say I'll do it, I'll commit seriously and I don't want to do a half a** job.

BTW, you need stickers? I'll give you a genuine Canreef sticker on each of the items I make for you. Have you gotten the material yet?

[reefburnaby]

Hi,

Same problem with Titus...really tied up with school and work. I do enough electronic stuff at work that I really don't want to put myself up to a major project like this.

But here...this will give you a really good head start. Try using a TI 8x series graphical programmable calculator as a micro and using that to drive a couple of I2C devices. I2C is a serial bus protocol and lots of chips understand it...including ADC, DACs and other stuff. Really, you only need a set of DACs and ADCs for input and output. Slap on some protection circuitry and a power supply...that's it. You get a nice graphical display, lots of memory and it controls your tank. Its not the cheapest...but a great way to proto it. Plus, it has a fairly high chance of it work since most of the difficult hardware is encapsulated in the calculator.

Hope that helps.

- Victor.

[DJ88]

very nice idea Victor.. smile.gif now how long was that sitting in your head? or did you jsut come up with it? smile.gif I may try it.

Titus.. I have some of the acrylic.. with midterms this week life as I know it is on hold.

[titus]

Hello,

Oh my goodness, another one of those EE people who likes their programmable calculators so much. Hey I have my HP 48GX sitting on my desk collecting dust. These stuff are so slow.

Darren, yes let me know whenever you are ready. I've been sitting in my room for the last few weeks trying to put down what I have done in the last 3 years into words. This is killing and the itch to do more acrylic work is growing.

[reefburnaby]

Hi,

Yah...I've been siting on since you wanted to build a controller. I was waiting for the calculators to go on sale....then I got busy with other stuff.

The beauty of TI calculators is that they are fast...Z80s running at 5 to 10 MHz or MC68000 runing at 8 to 10 MHz (depending on the model). As you know, the original Macs, Ataris and Amigas had the 68000 8MHz as its CPU smile.gif

I2C code has already been written for those calculators. www.ticalc.org (http://www.ticalc.org)

HP calcs are nice...but they are harder to find and a bit more expensive.

- Victor.