K8055 Velleman

LA6WNA

Hi
My son has got this PC interface board from Velleman as a scool project. He has finished the K8055 board and got it working with his laptop via USB. He showed me the project and I was imediately thinking; could this board be driven directly by a Propeller 1? Has anyone out there tried anything like this before? The K8055 uses DLL to communicate with PC software.
Here is the actual board: https://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=351346

bob_g4bby

Looks a nice board for experimenters. I wouldn't personally attempt driving the usb port of the 8055 with a propeller, just far too complicated. How about taking out the processor from its socket and replacing it with a dil header. The Propeller i/o pins could then drive the external circuitry of the 8055 via wire links. This might lead on to reproducing the 8055 circuits or whatever else takes his fancy on a propeller prototyping board.

My experimenting these days is about buying the cheap surface mount i/o boards from ebay (there are 100s of types), fitting them with .1" pins and plugging them into sockets on experimenters pcb ( the sort with isolated solder pads). The circuit is wired together on the solder pad side with thin single strand wire. That way, much of a project remains reusable for new projects, a bit like lego.

DigitalBob

Depends on what you mean by driving with the propeller. This 8055 is a GUI based board that sends comands for the PC user interface down to the board via USB. I can do the same with a propeller P1 using a program called Labview by National Instruments. You could use the 8055 to turn on different pins on the prop or vice versa. The same with the ADC and DAC.

bob_g4bby

How about you and your son learning how to program with Labview, the community version is free for non-commercial use and is not crippled in any way. There is a driver for the k8055 here . Labview is widely used in industry and compiles windows applications that run very quickly. I used it to write small programs for hardware test during the last twenty years of my career. Highly recommended, very powerful, rapid application dev system - but only if it appeals to your son of course! Labview can also be used with arduino and raspberry pi amongst 1000s of other devices. I use Labview still with my ham radio hobby, together with pic and propeller projects. I have written a software defined HF receiver in Labview, too - which taught me a lot about dsp without it being a life's work, like some lower level languages. Just a thought. Incidentally, it's a graphical, menu based language, not text based, which may appeal to your youngster. It's one of two computer languages which I really enjoy using. The other one is forth, which is why I use Tachyon on the propeller P1. I've wondered why this is - I can only think that both languages were written by experimenters for experimenters. Both languages encourage incremental coding, so you're very quickly getting results at all stages of the program. I tend to write bottom up, too, so you're immediately getting the hardware to do stuff, so the immediate buzz is there. Also, Labview greatly extended what I've been able to do as a hardware engineer. I would never have attempted some of the projects I did without it, like driving in 6th gear instead of 1st. Your mind can stay focussed on the problem and not worry about complicated syntax and tools. You can tell I like it!

In the attached picture, is a small labview program I wrote in about 20 mins this afternoon which sends text based commands to a Propeller. In the left While loop, any time the Frequency control changes, a string is sent to tachyon - it has just sent '1600000 RFtune <cr>', as i wanted to tune the SI5351 to 1.6MHz that the propeller had been programmed to control in tachyon forth. In the While loop on the right, you can see any replies are displayed in the Reply string display ( Just tachyon cmd prompt here). Both While loops are running at the same time and independent of each other - trivial to do in labview, but much less obvious and less easy in other languages. Although it doesn't show, my mouse cursor was hovering over the 'Configure serial port' vi. I have turned on Context help, which pops up a Context help window - a summary of the inputs and outputs - i don't have to remember anything about it. If I want more help, then pressing 'Detailed help' gives me everything about that function. Hovering over any function in the menu system also shows the same thing. Very useful whether beginner or expert, much less memorised knowledge needed to write labview than any text language.

73 de Bob

andyw

Hi Bob,

I'm new to Labview and wish to control an IS5351 with a vi. I have both K8055 and P1. wondering if you could post more details of your work with tachyon and Labview vi. Thanks.

Andy