Arduino And The Pandora

[kattle87]

I was wondering what can be done with the pandora and the arduino if they are combined toghether
Mainly I am thinking about this: most of arduinos boards can be used via USB (regognized as a serial USB adapter) but this solution might become pretty umpractical (eats up one USB, cables need far more space and battery life decreases). What about using the ext port to get a serial connection between the Arduino and the Panda? Will this be more viable?
(asking this since I'm an hardware n00b even if I have done something with the arduino via serial-on-USB.
more infos @:
CODE
http://arduino.cc/

 

[gruso]

That's an interesting little er, thing. Will have to read more about what people are doing with it.

RS232 will be available at the EXT port. The Arduino software looks to be open source too. So the real question would be, what -can't- be done with the Pandora and the Arduino?

 

[Mithrildor]

That's an interesting little er, thing. Will have to read more about what people are doing with it.

RS232 will be available at the EXT port. The Arduino software looks to be open source too. So the real question would be, what -can't- be done with the Pandora and the Arduino?

Fullspeed Playstation 3 emulation?

 

[Kramy]

The Pandora can act like a host-PC, I believe.

The question is - why? What do you want to do with an Arduino?

 

[Squidge]

Isn't the Arduino just an Atmel MCU thrown onto a board with a few other bits? There should be plenty of wires to wire it upto the Pandora. Serial via Ext port looks tasty, but you will need level translator(s) as I don't think the Arduino board is 2.8V tolerant, and the Pandora isn't 5V tolerant.

 

[gruso]

Fullspeed Playstation 3 emulation?

Yeah, maybe not full speed.

 

[Kramy]

The primary purpose of the Arduino seems to be robotics experiments.

I've been reading hackaday.com for a while. I've seen remote controlled planes, a lego segway, museum humidity sensors, a dancing hexapod, and countless other experiments.

It's a hardware hacker's rapid prototyping board.

So back to the original question - why do you want to wire them together? Going to use your Pandora to log some type of data over time?

 

[kattle87]

What I do know is that if you want to connect it to a windows PC, you need to install the FT232R UART USB driver, and that it has 2 "Serial pins: 0 (RX) and 1 (TX). Used to receive (RX) and transmit (TX) TTL serial data. These pins are connected to the corresponding pins of the FTDI USB-to-TTL Serial chip."

This said... well... some people actually did some crazy stuff with their arduino.
EG: I would like to attempt something like this:
CODE
http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/01/arduino-armed-acer-aspire-one-and-wheels-tools-around-shoots-vi/

Or you could easily use it for stuff like a "meteo station" I was going to build with the arduino: the arduino itself has a really little eeprom so one might use the pandora to "download the data" let's say once in a day (I could do the same with my PC but with the pandora it would just be cool and more practical)

More generally, the arduino is just a physicall computing platform with 6 analog-to-digital 10-bit ADC and 13 digital I/O. You can do pretty nasty stuff with it. Just check instructables [dot] com

 

[Tobs]

It's probably not worth using an arduino to communicate with the P&|a. It's a lot of effort to write a good driver for the FTDI chip (it's a very popular chip, there might already be one for Angstrom?) and RS232 is really easy to do with just an ATMega128 (the chip on the arduino) and a Max232 with a few caps.

I already have a custom-made frets on fire guitar that works via an ATMega128 and RS232 so I'll probably port that to the P&|a if there's ever a FoF port.
There's a few other things I could do with this, such as modding a NES controller to work via RS232. The magical thing is that via RS232 and using a client app to control key presses, you can have as many keys pressed simultaneously as you want, instead of the usual 3 (don't know if the P&|a keyboard will suffer from this, I know the gamepad doesn't)

Tobs

 

[kattle87]

It's a lot of effort to write a good driver for the FTDI chip (it's a very popular chip, there might already be one for Angstrom?) and RS232 is really easy to do with just an ATMega128 (the chip on the arduino) and a Max232 with a few caps.

Yep! This is why I don't want to use it as a USB peripherical, but I wanted to know if we can directly use the "rx" and "tx" pins to link the Arduino to the Panda's ext.
The fact is that the arduino comes with a fools-proof package for programming it. And I confirm that creating something with it is as easy as soldering 3 wires and writing a C "hello world" program. Then press a button and your program is uploaded to the board. That's all. Nothing needed except for a USB cable.

SECOND EDIT: CODE
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ArduinoSoftwareRS232

this means: "yes, we can" connect Panda & Arduino

 

[todd]

If you do not want to use a USB connector, there are Arduinos with bluetooth.

E.g.: CODE
http://www.arduino.cc/en/Guide/ArduinoBT

 

[atomicthumbs]

There are Arduino boards that use USB and Bluetooth for interfacing. Those would probably work more easily.

 

[vputz]

As a small-time Arduino hacker who's messed about with RS232 communications to the Arduino (http://orbduino.sourceforge.net), you should have no trouble communicating with the Arduino via pins 0 and 1; pretty much all the FTDI on the Arduino does is exactly that: act like a COM port since USB ports are more common than RS232 DB9 ports these days. The OrbShield was really intended for communicating with serial gaming devices like the SpaceOrb 360, but it 'shares' the port with the Arduino's USB connection (that's why I had to put DIP switches so you could turn the orb port off and reprogram it). You could make a similar device and talk to the Arduino via RS232 no trouble. I'm not 100% sure you could reprogram it via that serial port, but you may be able to; I haven't tried.

More annoying is that you'd have to make some dispensation for power, since the USB connection conveniently carries a nice +5v. That's quite doable, but it's one additional connection.

I'd be curious to see what advantage there would be in a Pandora+Arduino, though, that's any better than any old laptop (and a lot more convenient). Sorta the whole point of the Arduino is that you can program it and set it free; if it has to be tied to a computer (for communication) it's usually to something static (sending data to a server or desktop, say). Maybe there's some portable reason, though, which would be cool. If you want serious portability and physical computing, you're probably better off just getting a Beagleboard and going whole hog.

 

[Etinin]

I think the objective would be to configure the Arduino on the go.

 

[vputz]

I think the objective would be to configure the Arduino on the go.

Sure; in that case either hack one of the USB Arduinos to do what you want, or use the serial version: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardSerial.

If you're planning on developing/compiling on the Pandora, do note that the Arduino software is java-based, but as long as someone does a big java port to Angstrom, that should be fine. And you'd need avr-g++ as well. Doable, but not 100% trivial.

 

[bzar]

An xkcd comic (http://xkcd.com/413/) popped into my head after reading this

 

[kattle87]

An xkcd comic (http://xkcd.com/413/) popped into my head after reading this

MUST... TRY... THIS...

However, just wanted to say everyone that my aim is not arduino programming on-the-go. It's something more like "provide the Pandora with sensors and actuators" or "easy datalogging"

 

[beanoman]

If the serial ports in the ext connector work like normal com ports in linux, it shouldn't be a problem, especially if you use a board like the Sparkfun mini board. Their 8mhz board will be fine with the 2.8 volt supply and signals, especially if you don't need to program it(which should be fine too, I've just never tried it myself).

If you need more than 2.8v for sensors or other chips, it might be easier to just use the regular USB/FTDI setup. I know there are drivers for that 'for linux', don't know what those need to work on the pandora.

Either way, don't worry about powering it from the pandora, it would be hard to even notice the difference.

 

[cobaltage]

However, just wanted to say everyone that my aim is not arduino programming on-the-go. It's something more like "provide the Pandora with sensors and actuators" or "easy datalogging"

Skynet?

Other than robotics, the Arduino is frequently mentioned in relation to music and video art projects to create open-source real-time control hardware. You could check out createdigitialmusic or createdigitalmotion -- the two blogs are written by the same people.

 

[Squidge]

If the serial ports in the ext connector work like normal com ports in linux, it shouldn't be a problem, especially if you use a board like the Sparkfun mini board. Their 8mhz board will be fine with the 2.8 volt supply and signals, especially if you don't need to program it(which should be fine too, I've just never tried it myself).

It's a normal UART, but it's not level shifted, so will be at signal level rather than RS-232 levels. Supply is 2.8V, Signals are 1.8V. Use a TXB0104.