Love the spinneret, hate the low number of I/O pins.

Doofus

The spinneret is a great device, one that I can capture experiments in a stand-a-lone fashion. But I must admit, I got spoiled by the professional board. I can park 6 different experiments on the pro board and just have fun all day. I bought a spinneret, to make experiments portable. You know, plug in a wireless link to the internet socket, send the data back to my PC through my routers wireless port so I could run experiments in my lab all day and check on them during lunch time. With the limited number of ports for MY i/o, i'm going to need a butt load of spinnerets to cover the number of inputs i need. Is there going to be a spinneret-2 that helps with this problem??

Pretty please???

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

What kind of I/O do you need? It's always possible to expand the available I/O pins with shift registers.

-Phil

Doofus

Yeah but, the point of having 8 processors is to parallel things up. Being I/O bound kinda shoots that in the foot. If one ( me, namely) is measuring PWM data, encoder data, and data that comes from SPI sources, then I can run outta pins before i run outta processors.

In your shift register example, what did you have in mind?

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Doofus wrote:

Yeah but, the point of having 8 processors is to parallel things up. Being I/O bound kinda shoots that in the foot.

I'm not sure I understand your complaint. Have you even looked at the Spinneret schematic? It's not like there are any unused Propeller pins that might have been brought out for general use.

In your shift register example, what did you have in mind?

There are plenty of examples in the forum of how to use the 74HC595 and 74HC165 for I/O expansion.

-Phil

Paul

Have you looked into the W5200 for QS? It's plugged into a Quickstart board and has a few more I/O ports I believe.

http://www.parallax.com/product/40002

Doofus

When I looked at the schematic, I saw that most of the I/O was used up by the I-net chip.

To Paul's point: the Wiznet does look better

To Phil's latest point: If I am measuring pulse widths how does that work with a 74HC595?

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

Doofus wrote:

To Phil's latest point: If I am measuring pulse widths how does that work with a 74HC595?

It doesn't. The 74HC595 is an output shift-and-store register. But it won't work with a 74HC165 either, unless the pulses are really long.

How many different pulse channels do you have to monitor?

-Phil

Mike G

I can park 6 different experiments on the pro board and just have fun all day. I bought a spinneret, to make experiments portable. You know, plug in a wireless link to the internet socket, send the data back to my PC through my routers wireless port so I could run experiments in my lab all day and check on them during lunch time.

I develop projects with the WIZ820io. The WIZ820io takes 4 to 7 IO pins. The three extra, if ya want 'em connected, are reset, power down, and interrupt. The SPI bus requires four IO.

If you have 4 extra pins and simply wish to webenize experiments, the WIZ820io is a solid choice.

WizNet has a new toy, the WIZ550io. The WIZ550io has an embedded MAC and handles DHCP on start up. The W5500 chip, see thread, has double the buffers, 32k. Plus the buffer are general use. The Prop can store run-time data. So all those little data elements you'd like to persist without using HUB resources is available ove the SPI bus... Cool