Serial Communication in the background
Hi All
So i am a bit confused.
I have been looking into setting my christmas lights to music with dimming.
To do the dimming you have to turn the power on at different times in the AC cycle, and you have to do this every cycle.
Reading thru a bunch of stuff it seems people most people use pic microcontrollers.
The serial data "interrupts" the program when needed. Thus the pic can actively dim the lights and when serial data starts coming in, it stops to receive the data.
My question is, can a Basic Stamp do something similar?
As far as i understand it doesn't have anything like an interrupt.
Does Shiftin/shiftout do what I am asking?
I probably am not asking my questions correctly.
Thanks
Lucas
So i am a bit confused.
I have been looking into setting my christmas lights to music with dimming.
To do the dimming you have to turn the power on at different times in the AC cycle, and you have to do this every cycle.
Reading thru a bunch of stuff it seems people most people use pic microcontrollers.
The serial data "interrupts" the program when needed. Thus the pic can actively dim the lights and when serial data starts coming in, it stops to receive the data.
My question is, can a Basic Stamp do something similar?
As far as i understand it doesn't have anything like an interrupt.
Does Shiftin/shiftout do what I am asking?
I probably am not asking my questions correctly.
Thanks
Lucas
Comments
Both the Parallax SX and Propeller processors are fast enough and versatile enough to do the analog to digital conversion and the dimmer control themselves. You'd still need the isolation from the AC line for the triac trigger (for switching) and the zero-crossing detection for the dimmer timing.
I just found this thread where someone did what i was thinking with additional hardware.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=524010
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