Installing a Sensor
Installing a Sensor
by JavaRN
Fri Aug 21, 2009 8:10 am
I would like to add a sensor to my roboard. The problem is that on the board in the A/D section there are connections with two pins only. From the manual I noticed that one of them is GND and the other is for the data coming from the sensor. Most sensors, like for example the sharp distance sensor have three connection, which usually include the 5v supply to the sensor. How can this extra connection be added to roboard.
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by PedroR
Fri Aug 21, 2009 1:35 pm
Hi JavaRN
You can get the 5V from the USB connector onboard.
You'll notice the board has one USB connector soldered and has an additional set of pins to connect two external USB ports.
In that set of pins you'll find 2 pins with 5V.
You can get the voltage from there.
I think the hardware manual for the roboard has the description of the pins so you can identify the 5V pins.
Regards
Pedro.
You can get the 5V from the USB connector onboard.
You'll notice the board has one USB connector soldered and has an additional set of pins to connect two external USB ports.
In that set of pins you'll find 2 pins with 5V.
You can get the voltage from there.
I think the hardware manual for the roboard has the description of the pins so you can identify the 5V pins.
Regards
Pedro.
by PedroR
Fri Aug 21, 2009 2:05 pm
Hi JavaRN
I'm not sure if there is any place else on the board.
You can get power from the pins on the comm ports and the pwm ports but the voltage on these is the same that you apply on the input of the board so you'd need to use a voltage regulator.
You can get one from us here http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info ... cts_id/312 . It's quite inexpensive and it would reduce the voltage you get on a PWM port to the 5V.
You'll find a link to the specs on the product page.
I think the other alternative would be trying to insert a small wire into the connector for the external USB ports or put it inside the connector hole and the inserting the connector onto the board....
It's not very elegant though...
I'm not sure if there is any place else on the board.
You can get power from the pins on the comm ports and the pwm ports but the voltage on these is the same that you apply on the input of the board so you'd need to use a voltage regulator.
You can get one from us here http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info ... cts_id/312 . It's quite inexpensive and it would reduce the voltage you get on a PWM port to the 5V.
You'll find a link to the specs on the product page.
I think the other alternative would be trying to insert a small wire into the connector for the external USB ports or put it inside the connector hole and the inserting the connector onto the board....
It's not very elegant though...
by TomTomz
Tue Nov 24, 2009 5:49 pm
Hi,
I was wondering if anyone had already managed to read from an analogic sensor (distance infrared sensor for instance) ?
I have tried using the 5V power pin from the SPI connector and using one of the 8 available analog channels but none of the Analog API functions of the RoboIO seems to get a value different from 32676 nor passing the Initialization phase ...
I would be very grateful for any hint or code sample I could use to check my Infrared Sensor on this board.
Thx.
I was wondering if anyone had already managed to read from an analogic sensor (distance infrared sensor for instance) ?
I have tried using the 5V power pin from the SPI connector and using one of the 8 available analog channels but none of the Analog API functions of the RoboIO seems to get a value different from 32676 nor passing the Initialization phase ...
I would be very grateful for any hint or code sample I could use to check my Infrared Sensor on this board.
Thx.
by TomTomz
Wed Nov 25, 2009 9:22 am
Ok well ... after investigations I finally found out what was going wrong.
I tried the spi_Initialize() function and always had the error "I/O library fails to initialize" (thx to the function roboio_GetErrMsg() I discovered while investigating the source files...
).
It was due to a missing WinIO.sys and WinIO.dll which I had recompiled in Visual Studio 2008 and I suppose that the ones I had in my windows\system32 directory where not the good ones.
I just copied them into my program's directory and all went fine. I now can read analog values.
I tried the spi_Initialize() function and always had the error "I/O library fails to initialize" (thx to the function roboio_GetErrMsg() I discovered while investigating the source files...
).
It was due to a missing WinIO.sys and WinIO.dll which I had recompiled in Visual Studio 2008 and I suppose that the ones I had in my windows\system32 directory where not the good ones.
I just copied them into my program's directory and all went fine. I now can read analog values.