| Mactronics :: activewire |
 Activewire is a USB I/O board with 16 programmable I/O pins that can interface to almost anything. The board is sold by Activewire Inc. The board is fairly small and can be powered from the USB cable of from an external 5VCC.The company is still working on MacOS X drivers. You can use the board in Classic or get Dave Keck's great MacOSX port of the drivers. It includes a framework you can use with almost any programming language and a REALBasic plugin and its only $6.00. |
 Manipulating the I/O pins using the driver is quite easy. Yet the actual layout of those pins on the hardware is different. I put together this PDF to help myself and avoid messing-up the board. Notice that the USB controller in the board is a CYPRESS AN2131 or also known as EZ-USB. Linux Pithan has a framework for MacOSX including the source code to manipulate the EZ-USB controller. To learn how to control the Activewire board using EZ-USB download the Linux examples from Activewire's website. While you are at it you may also want to try the Keyspan USB-to-DB9-serial adaptor, which also uses the EZ-USB controller. The Keyspan USB adapater (about $35.00) can be a nice and chip programmable USB interface to play with. When programing your board you will need to do a lot of bit manipulation. Check my CodeBits section for code examples on how to manipulate bits in REALBasic. |
 Most of the time you would need to provide your own power, since the power provided by the USB is limited. To do so you need to first remove the PWR.J1 jumper from the board. Then build a regulated source of power. The Activewire board needs 5 volts to operate. Here is a simple diagram of voltage regulator using a 7805. This diagram if for a negative input that is not ground. If you have a ground input then remove the .33uF capacitor from the input and place a 1uF capacitor from ground to pin number 3 which is the output. Now you can just connect your regulated +5V to any VCC pin in the board and your ground to any GRND pin in the board. |
Here is a list of some good books that I own and recommend:
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