Messages

61

General Discussion / Re: How do the Micro SD shield and Led pin 13 interact? Do they interfere?

« on: December 09, 2013, 08:55:32 PM »

This is actually expected - the LED on pin 13 is also shared with the SPI SCLK clock, which is used by the microSD card TinyShield.  So when you use a SPI device like the SD card, the LED will blink, and the SD library will override the digitalWrite() function call.  This is also just how it works on the Arduino Uno, which is why we used the same pin for the LED.

If you need a LED for indication, you'll need to hook up an external one to a different I/O pin.

Thanks!

Ken Burns
TinyCircuits

62

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: How can I attach my own battery to the TinyDuino

« on: December 04, 2013, 07:06:10 PM »

Hi Aowing,

It could be that your board is damaged somehow, there is power switching circuitry on the TinyDuino board that sounds like it isn't working, contact us at info@tiny-circuits.com and we can get you a replacement.

Thanks,

Ken Burns
TinyCircuits

63

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: Battery CR1632 isn`t enough for the TD sandwich

« on: December 04, 2013, 07:03:43 PM »

Hi Braza,

The coin cell option is nice for a lot of low power applications, however a coin cell can only put out around 5 - 10mA, so anything higher power will need a beefier battery.  The TinyDuino processor board does have two pins on it to allow connection to an external power source, like a bigger battery pack, which is sounds like you'll need. 

Some of your other issues will be due to the voltage difference, so you should choose the resistor values based on the voltage of the battery pack if that's what you'll be using long term.

Thanks!

Ken Burns
TinyCircuits

64

General Discussion / Re: WIFI

« on: December 04, 2013, 06:59:22 PM »

Sorry all for the lack of documentation on this board - there is now a section under the Learn part of the website that lists how to get going with this:  https://tiny-circuits.com/learn/using-wifi-tinyshield

As a number of you have determined, this will work with the Adafruit CC3000 Arduino libraries, and all of their examples will work, the only change are that the pin mapping needs changed at the beginning of the Arduino sketches.

Also one of our Kickstarter backers just put up a nice tutorial of making a WiFi Temperature sensor using the TinyDuino and the WiFi TinyShield: http://www.openhomeautomation.net/tiny-wifi-temperature-arduino/

Thanks!

Ken
TinyCircuits

65

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: Proto Board pins

« on: November 05, 2013, 10:19:10 PM »

Hi hellmaker,

I apologize for the delays in getting back with you and for the scarce documentation on the website, we are working on much improved docs. 

Since the TinyDuino uses the exact same pin mapping as a standard Arduino Uno, the standard Arduino documentation is a great place to see what each pin does.  http://arduino.cc/en/Main/arduinoBoardUno.   So the PWM is supported on pins: 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, and 11.

The pins labelled the SS, SCLK, MISO and MOSI pins are the SPI lines which are also digital signals for the Arduino. 

SS = 10
MOSI = 11
MISO = 12
SCK = 13

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

66

New Product Ideas / Re: Temperature, Humidity and Pressure

« on: November 05, 2013, 10:14:08 PM »

Hi Camillo,

We actually have about 10 new boards that have been developed and being prototyped up now, we hope to announce these in early Dec.

One note is that some of the boards are power hungry (like the WiFi), so you'll need a larger power source than the coin cell to run these, such as a small Li-Ion battery for your weather station. 

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

67

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: How can I attach my own battery to the TinyDuino

« on: November 05, 2013, 10:11:28 PM »

There are a few ways you can connect the battery - there are two contacts on every TinyDuino processor board next to the main connector that are labelled GND and +, and battery power can be applied here.  You can also apply battery power on the Proto1 board on the VBATT and GND pins.

VBATT (The battery voltage) can be between 2.7V and 5.0V.  If the battery voltage can be higher than 5.0V, you will need to use a voltage regulator as cseng14 recommends.  However single cell Li-ion batteries will be fine, since their nominal voltage is 3.7 volts and under a charge condition will get up to 4.3V max.

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

68

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: Problem with initial use of Bluetooth Low Energy TinyShield

« on: November 05, 2013, 10:07:14 PM »

Hi Caroline,

I greatly apologize for the delay in getting back to you on this.  Are you running the board with the USB board plugged in - if so this may be the cause of the issue since the Rev 1 BLE boards share the same UART as the USB Boards and cannot be used at the same time.

Best Regards,

Ken Burns
TinyCircuits

69

General Discussion / Re: New Shields, ETA

« on: October 27, 2013, 09:54:12 PM »

Sorry for the delay on getting these up.  As Keith mentions we've been shipping these to Kickstarter backers.  We're in the process of updating the website with more information, for now I've put up the WiFi and GPS pages with new information (and pricing), along with a small amount that people can order now.  After we're complete with the Kickstarter shipments, we'll get more made available for sale.

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

70

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: Check Voltage Level

« on: October 26, 2013, 07:02:08 PM »

Hi Wafel,

By default the battery voltage is not directly connected to a readable pin, however this is certainly possible to read using some simple circuitry.  You can get access to the VBATT voltage on any of the prototyping boards - you'll need to route this into one of the analog pins in order to read it.  However the voltage will need to be divided down in order to get it lower than the analog voltage reference.

Here is a simple resistor divider circuit that will do this for you, comprised of two resistors, one 100K ohm and one 25K ohm.   


VBATT      100K          A0           25K         GND
    |-------/\/\/\/-------| -------/\/\/\/\-------|


The voltage at A0 will be equal to VBATT * (25K / 125K).  Or 0.2 * VBATT

Set the analogReference to use the internal 1.1V value, and using an analogRead() on A0, you will get back the ADC value of A0.  The battery voltage will equal 5 * ( ADC_VALUE / 1023 ) * 1.1. 

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

71

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: GPS Shield Pinout

« on: October 20, 2013, 12:52:03 AM »

We've just got some documentation up for this as well as an example sketch to get going:

http://tiny-circuits.com/learn/using-gps-tinyshield/

Thanks!

72

TinyLily / Re: Running hc-sr04 ultrasonic sensor with TinyLily

« on: October 20, 2013, 12:50:04 AM »

Can you post the code or email it to me at: kburns@tiny-circuits.com?

Are you using the reference pin for the ADC?  If so, the TinyLily doesn't have one, so you'll need to use the VCC rail as the reference voltage.

Thanks,

Ken

73

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: BLE Board Upload Issue

« on: October 09, 2013, 09:37:58 PM »

jordyjoe1,

Unfortunately not, the pins will still be used by both the USB and BLE boards, so there will be a contention issue. 

We've just completely a new board rev for the BLE, which adds the option to use different pins than the USB board, so they will both be usable at the same time, these should be available in a few weeks.

Thanks,

Ken Burns
TinyCircuits

74

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / Re: Serial Port

« on: October 09, 2013, 09:35:46 PM »

Hi Wafel,

Definitely!  There is one hardware UART that is also used by the USB to program it.  In addition, you can use the Arduino SoftwareSerial to make any other pins on the TinyDuino (which is basically just a shrunk down Arduino Uno) into a software UART.  This is what we use for a number of our TinyShields that use UARTs, include the GPS TinyShield.

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits

75

TinyLily / Re: Pinout documentation

« on: October 09, 2013, 09:25:03 PM »

On the TinyLily Mini, the numbers shown correspond to the Arduino "pin numbers", such as for the digitalWrite function.  So 0 as marked on the TinyLily Mini is accessed as pin number 0 in the Arduino IDE.  The ones that have the A prefix are analog pins.  In total, digital pins 0, 1, 2, 3 are supported, and analog (or digital) pins A0, A1, A4 and A5 are supported.  There are also some alternate functions on the pins (the same as an Arduino Uno), so A4 and A5 can also be used as I2C pins, and pins 0 and 1 are connected up to the USB programmer.

Because 0 and 1 are connected to the USB programmer, you can't use this pins at the same time as when the USB is plugged in (which is why it might look like they are not working to some people). 

The + and - pins are power and ground.  There are two sets of these, and they are connected together.  The reason for this is that you can have a battery hooked up to one pair, then the other pair can be used to provide power out to any peripherals you have. 

The 6 pins in the middle (that aren't soldered to anything) are for an in-circuit programming connection.  This lets you program the microcontroller initially with the Arduino IDE, and a 6-pin connector can be soldered in to allow ICSP programming and debugging using an external debugger, but most Arduino users will never use this.  If you look at the schematic, the ICSP connector used the SPI pins on the processor, so if you absolutely need some additional I/O points, you can grab a few more signals off of this.

Thanks,

Ken
TinyCircuits