Changing the address is easy. Pins 1-3 are the address. However, because pins 1-4 are wired together on the ProtoBoard, it would be easiest to lift pin 1 from the pcb - heat pin 1 with a soldering iron and lift the pin with a fine knife, solder a fine wire (kynar - the wire wrap kind) to a section of the proto board. Now, add a 10K pullup to 3V3 and a link (for a shunt) to ground. Join the wire to the junction of the resistor and link. With the link/shunt in, the prop will boot from eeprom, without it will not.
Clock Loop, I want to run your Big Boy circuit and software using some Parallax Proto Boards.
Yes, the Rx and Tx lines would be used in programming.
There are 20 boards spaced .75-inch apart.
You don't need to disable the eeproms. The circuit and software are oblivious to the eeprom. Once the circuit powers on, it will try to run the program on the eeprom, so let it. Just load a dummy program into the eeprom, a program that shuts the prop off. The eeprom uses p29 and p28.
The bigboy circuit and program use pins p31 and p30.
I would not modify the circuits on each pcb at all. You shouldn't have to do this to run my example program. Unless I am missing something on those pcb's.
Like I said, just load the eeproms with a dummy program.
Changing the address is easy. Pins 1-3 are the address. However, because pins 1-4 are wired together on the ProtoBoard, it would be easiest to lift pin 1 from the pcb - heat pin 1 with a soldering iron and lift the pin with a fine knife, solder a fine wire (kynar - the wire wrap kind) to a section of the proto board. Now, add a 10K pullup to 3V3 and a link (for a shunt) to ground. Join the wire to the junction of the resistor and link. With the link/shunt in, the prop will boot from eeprom, without it will not.
Just gotta be careful because some EEPROMs don't bring out the address select bits and are effectively hardwired for address 0 internally. The Catalyst 24WC128 shown on the prop proto board schematic is one such device that doesn't bring out the address pins.
But it sounds like you'll be fine following Clock Loops advice to get up and runnning...
You don't need to disable the eeproms. The circuit and software are oblivious to the eeprom. Once the circuit powers on, it will try to run the program on the eeprom, so let it. Just load a dummy program into the eeprom, a program that shuts the prop off. The eeprom uses p29 and p28.
The bigboy circuit and program use pins p31 and p30. I would not modify the circuits on each pcb at all. You shouldn't have to do this to run my example program. Unless I am missing something on those pcb's.
Like I said, just load the eeproms with a dummy program.
About the eeprom dummy program - you said it would shut off the prop? Can you give an example?
Kuroneko, thanks! I had no idea it was that simple.
Clock Loop, thank you! This is a great plan - no need to modify the eeproms is the best solution.
After the main program loads RAM through the serial pins, it looks like these eeproms could be used at that time for other purposes. Before power down however, it would need to reload the dummy program.
Tubular, thank you very much for your suggestions. Cluso99, thanks for the hardware details, very good to know..
Kuroneko, thanks! I had no idea it was that simple.
Clock Loop, thank you! This is a great plan - no need to modify the eeproms is the best solution.
After the main program loads RAM through the serial pins, it looks like these eeproms could be used at that time for other purposes. Before power down however, it would need to reload the dummy program.
You don't want to modify the circuitry on those pcb boards AT ALL. As they are, unmodified, they might be worth something, you could re-sell them for cheap, if you wanted to move into a dip chip, or even make your own pcb with smt prop chips.
I am about to upload a new picture, program and schematic for the bb, it has more than 40 props. If you need help getting your pcb's to work, post in the big boy thread. My best advice to you is only wire up two or three pcb's at first to get them talking. Getting that first step to work will be your biggest hurdle, after that its just a matter of adding more, up to the limits of the noise you have on your lines.
Why is that? Again, what are you trying to achieve?
I now realize the eeprom in the Proto Board is 64K, so the first 32K can keep the dummy program intact (only need to load it one time) and the upper 32K can be used for programming. Post #5 details the general hardware objective. Overall the long range goal is to create a self booting master from a single eeprom and distribute the same program to slaves in creating a simple brain simulation that shares a common clock. The slave props each will have a self evolving program similar to the BASIC Stamp SEED Supercomputer (Self Evolving Enumerating Deterministic) TinyAI software and TriCore Tiny AI. The Parallax Proto Board stock eeproms can store data such as enumeration, but on a scale 4x larger, in SPIN instead of PBASIC, thousands of times faster, and much more capable.
You don't want to modify the circuitry on those pcb boards AT ALL. As they are, unmodified, they might be worth something, you could re-sell them for cheap, if you wanted to move into a dip chip, or even make your own pcb with smt prop chips.
I am about to upload a new picture, program and schematic for the bb, it has more than 40 props. If you need help getting your pcb's to work, post in the big boy thread. My best advice to you is only wire up two or three pcb's at first to get them talking. Getting that first step to work will be your biggest hurdle, after that its just a matter of adding more, up to the limits of the noise you have on your lines.
Thanks Clock Loop, I will follow your advice. I'm looking forward to your new information postings and want to congratulate you on your new largest prop machine!
Humanoido
Posts: 5,770
Comments
Does it really need to move pins, or would changing its address to something non zero (so it doesn't boot the prop) work?
If you dont want to boot the eeprom, you must be using the rx/tx lines to program the prop?
If you load the eeprom with a dummy shutdown program, this will accomplish what you want.
What are you trying to do?
Yes, the Rx and Tx lines would be used in programming.
There are 20 boards spaced .75-inch apart.
You don't need to disable the eeproms. The circuit and software are oblivious to the eeprom. Once the circuit powers on, it will try to run the program on the eeprom, so let it. Just load a dummy program into the eeprom, a program that shuts the prop off. The eeprom uses p29 and p28.
The bigboy circuit and program use pins p31 and p30.
I would not modify the circuits on each pcb at all. You shouldn't have to do this to run my example program. Unless I am missing something on those pcb's.
Like I said, just load the eeproms with a dummy program.
Just gotta be careful because some EEPROMs don't bring out the address select bits and are effectively hardwired for address 0 internally. The Catalyst 24WC128 shown on the prop proto board schematic is one such device that doesn't bring out the address pins.
But it sounds like you'll be fine following Clock Loops advice to get up and runnning...
Cluso99, thanks for the hardware details, very good to know..
Kuroneko, thanks! I had no idea it was that simple.
Clock Loop, thank you! This is a great plan - no need to modify the eeproms is the best solution.
After the main program loads RAM through the serial pins, it looks like these eeproms could be used at that time for other purposes. Before power down however, it would need to reload the dummy program.
You don't want to modify the circuitry on those pcb boards AT ALL. As they are, unmodified, they might be worth something, you could re-sell them for cheap, if you wanted to move into a dip chip, or even make your own pcb with smt prop chips.
I am about to upload a new picture, program and schematic for the bb, it has more than 40 props. If you need help getting your pcb's to work, post in the big boy thread. My best advice to you is only wire up two or three pcb's at first to get them talking. Getting that first step to work will be your biggest hurdle, after that its just a matter of adding more, up to the limits of the noise you have on your lines.