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U.S. Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Mike Chandler, 142nd Maintenance Photo by: Airman First Class Andrew Kobialka |
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Ok, I have updated my ACTs (Automatic Cable Tester), design. As I said in my last blog I have split the ACT into two functional parts.
- The control and display box/panel. Current plans do not include the internet, but there should be a working USB port.
- The interface box itself.
I have remembered that I had a BeagleBone Original (white) for a long time and never did anything with it. I even have the Ethernet Cape. When I checked the specs it in fact has two(2) I2C ports. The I2C are located on header P9 I2C1 on pins 17, 18, and I2C2 on pins 19 and 20. There are also plenty of GPIO pins to handle the Rotary Encoder (interrupt-driven) To handle the Rotary Encoder I will use eQEP (enhanced Quadrature-Encoded Pulse) decoder module built-in to the BB's TI Sitara ARM processor. 2 switches, and three LEDs. I even have the DVI-D with an HDMI connector on board! Should be Easy Peasy (knock on wood) getting this up and running!!
So here is what Wikipedia says about it:
The ARM Cortex-A8 is a 32-bit processor core licensed by ARM Holdings implementing the ARMv7-A architecture.
Compared to the ARM11, the Cortex-A8 is a dual-issue superscalar design, achieving roughly twice the instructions per cycle. The Cortex-A8 was the first Cortex design to be adopted on a large scale in consumer devices.
This will make my life less complicated as I now can eliminate the 4 RS485 modules and one processor. This makes my programming very straightforward. And to make it even better I can do all the code in C on Eclipse, not on the Arduino IDE!