UP Board

[KurtEck]

Now that the Teensy 3.5/6 Kickstarter and Beta are done, and my Kickstarter boards arrived yesterday, I thought I would give a quick update.

I now have the Up setup Dual booting with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04.

I have ROS Kame installed on this board, and have my fork of Kevin's hexapod stack building. I also have my Raspberry PI code compiling as well.

This last week they released a kernel which now allows me access to the 40 pin External header, including the Serial port. So today I verified I could talk using it to one of my Teensy 3.2 boards at 4mbs. I tested this with my Teensy version of the Arbotix Pro code.

Soon I will be building an overkill version of a Teensy RPI hat to use as my Servo controller here using a Teensy 3.6. I have a first version of a board for this, I received back from digistump, that hopefully will have time to build soon:

This picture also contains picture of a castilled (sp) like board for T3.5/6, which in theory I can solder on to bottom of one of these boards, and bring out all of the IO pins into double rows of pins....

Now back to playing with UP board. For example been wondering if it would make sense to have the Up talk to Teensy through SPI instead of Serial. The UP can do up to 25mhz here. But may then need to use an additional IO pin between the two for Teensy to tell UP that it has data available...

But right now still just figuring out what works...

[jwatte]

I think the word you want is "castellated" (which I think comes from how castle walls have gaps on the top for archers to fire down on enemies from, throwing rocks, etc.)

But may then need to use an additional IO pin between the two for Teensy to tell UP that it has data available

If you need the slave to tell the master that there is data, and the master doesn't regularly poll the slave, then yes, you will need a line for interrupt, in addition to the chip-select line you also need for SPI. It really uses a bunch of wires for being "just" a serial bus :-)

[KurtEck]

Thanks,

Yep - I meant to look up castellated

Sort of thinking out laud, about how much stuff do I want the Teensy to handle and what level of communications makes sense.

For example maybe it makes sense to go back to using USB, especially since I believe each USB port has a direct channel into the processor, so should work pretty well. Maybe should go RAW hid

They are having some issues with their USB3 driver, but hopefully they will solve that soon.

Right now just trying to figure out what things work or dont. Like can the UP properly connect to BNO055 IMU using I2C? The BNO055 uses clock stretching on I2C, which works on BBBK, but not RPI. It looked like it worked on ODroid. If it does, will probably have the main processor handle it. If not, then have Teensy...

[KurtEck]

Quick updates: Will probably create new thread later.

Over the last couple of days, I assembled one of the Castellated boards, (Actually 2nd attempt). More details up at: https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/36797...l=1#post117836

Sort of a Pain in the... Not sure If I will actually use it for anything or not.


But then decide to finally assemble one of the new RPI(UP) hats. So yesterday I started to assemble it. Started off with most of the surface mount parts, plus VR and power connector, and tried that out first to make sure no smoke, when I plugged in the 12v wall wart...


Then once I was sure of that I installed the Teensy and verified I could at least program it... Probably should have tested more before finishing the board, in case something terribly wrong, but...



So now the testing begins!

[jwatte]

Wow, 8 dxl connectors!
How thick are the traces from power to TTL bus for power?

[KurtEck]

I think most are in the range of 60-80 mill on both sides of the board.

The 8 are for: 6 legs, plus maybe head which are switched and then one which is not switched, which I can use if I wish to have something on the BUSS that maybe does not shut off with the other servos... Like maybe one of the Trinket/Teensy sensor or Neopixel boards... Or can use to maybe plug in another BEC if needed to power something else. I am hoping I don't need it as I have a 6 amp DC/DC converter on board...

[jwatte]

60 mil can only do like 5 Amps long term before heating up. (At 1 Oz)
For one socket, that's fine, but for 6 sockets, that might perhaps be limiting.
If it's run on both sides, it of course doubles the current.
When I do dynamixel slots these days, I use a ground polygon on one side and a hi-voltage polygon on the other side, to get "really wide" traces :-)
Also, the additional surface area means more heat dissipation, too.

[KurtEck]

Thanks,

They are actually 80s on bottom and maybe a bit more on GND as it is in the copper pour. Will update to more if I am going to build another one. I think my sound setup is not working... Will debug some more. Although maybe hard as Sound chip under processor...

Maybe better off simply using Prop shield and jumper over to speaker.

So far Neopixel is working, Setp that can have two sets, or can set up to use Dotstar instead. I want to check out a few more things before I then try plugging it into the back of a processor board. Not sure if I will go straight to UP board or maybe use something a bit cheaper and easier to replace, like maybe Odroid C1 (Or RPI)...

[KurtEck]

Also I thought I would mention, in the last Up email where it was talking ab the New York Maker Faire 2016, they mentioned:

UP² (UP-square)

With a great deal of anticipation, the team showed the prototype of the next generation of UP to some media. A comprehensive specification will be released with the Kickstarter campaign at midnight of 31^st October. Watch this space for UP² (UP-square) !

[KurtEck]

Looks like I will be making myself an updated version. As I mentioned should maybe have tested a few more things during the assembly.

Turns on I screwed up on the sound output. Missing a 20K resistor... When I try to do sound, nothing comes out, but feel speaker getting warm... Unfortunately the stuff is under the teensy, so can't fix this one. Will do a partial build of another board, with sound stuff, to patch to a teensy to make sure it works OK.

Then I can decide if I will build another one of this bunch with resistor soldered across, or maybe fabricate a new bunch with that fix, plus more copper around the power pins, with power on top, ground on bottom.

Someone also suggested on the Odroid forum to put in a polyfuse going to the power pins where I am back feeding host through pins 2, 4 on the header. Not sure what to limit it to? For C2, that I have tried it on they were saying the 2.? amps version, but my guess is for Xu4 or UP probably want 4 amps. So not sure how much this would help. The DC to DC converter can output up to 6 amps.

Now to build the sound test board.