How do you choose a new production programmer? This issue came up in our production department this week, and made us consider again what is important in a production programming system.
So what considerations are important when choosing a new programming system?
Firstly, where possible we use ISP (In System Programming) and all our own products are manufactured using ISP but that is not always possible and ISP will be discussed further in another post. We also carry out contract manufacturing and assembly, and this is where we needed a new socket programming solution. Continue reading “Help, Production Programmer Needed” »
Just when you thought you had complied with all the EU legislation needed for your electronics business, they dump another one on us and what a beauty!
This regulation, 2009/136/EC requires all websites that use cookies to inform the user and to obtain their consent before placing any cookie on the user’s PC.
AVR Dragon is a low cost In System Programmer (ISP) and also an In Circuit Emulator (ICE) in one package. It operates from Atmel AVR Studio development environment and is great for code development.
Having started your electronics business by doing a bit of trading on Ebay, you now want to be legitimate. In the last post, we discussed raising finance and the aversion of the banks to startups, electronics and risk (except complex financial instruments they don’t understand of course). Having raised money somehow, what other obstacles will the UK government and its bureaucratic allies in Brussels put in your way?
You have had this great idea for a new widget, or can see a gap in the market for an imported product, so how easy is it to set up a new electronics business in the UK? To test the water, you could just make some in your shed or import a few shipments and sell them on Ebay, (although HM Customs and Revenue are now data mining online to try and catch informal business and get more money!) but how easy is it to then create a formal business?
There are many different wireless protocols out there, but the ones that most people have heard of are WiFi and Bluetooth because these are used in devices that lots of us have, mobile phones and computers. There is a third alternative called ZigBee that is designed for control and instrumentation. What are the differences?
Most of us have PIC programmers for development, such as Microchip IDC2 or a PIC ICSP programmer such as PRESTO, which are very good at what they do. But they are not ideal for either production or field updates, because they require too much knowledge to use or need a laptop to be used in a challenging environment.
Since the advent of Windows 7, some of our customers have had problems with software updates because the update does not install successfully. These problems do not seem to happen in Vista but maybe nobody uses it!
These problems take the form of firmware mismatch or sometimes settings are not saved properly, and can affect some of our products and any other older software you may have.
A question we are commonly asked is “How do I copy a serial EEPROM chip?”. Serial EEPROMs are the memory chips found in car keys, some radios, PC motherboards and other electronics. They are usually 8 pin and retain data when the unit is switched off, which is why they are used for settings and configuration data. This is also why people want to copy them.
One feature of AVR devices that can baffle new users is the default clock setting on new AVR microcontrollers. They are set to run from their internal RC oscillator, usually 1 MHz, which throws out the timing on code samples, such as UART.
If the code is configured for an 8MHz clock and there is a 8MHz clock on the target board, you expect it to work but instead you get nothing or garbled characters. This is due to the default Internal RC. How do you change it?
