Hello all,
First of all i would like to thank Alistair for giving me this opportunity to test this equipment.
I received my kit yesterday, and soon started exploring it.
As Xavier CHAZE said in the other discution(), this kit is compose by three components: a freescale uC, a FTDI USB-serial chip, and the accelerometer.
Also with the kit is some documentation and a cd to install a applications which allows to explore some of the features of the accelerometer, like tilt, shake, tap, and orientation detection.
As there are already some reviews on this kit, i decided not to talk about what others have already talk, and start to discover a bit of the kit. First i have installed the freescale application which didn't work on my windows 7 x64:(
I had to install it on a windows xp machine to work.
As the kit has a USB-Serial Converter, you can develop your computer applications to "talk" to the freescale uC in order to receive the sensor data. And this was what I have done, first I had to discover the communications parameteres:
Baudrate: 38400
Data Bits: 8
Stop Bits: 1
Parity: None
Handshake: None
Then, using a serial port monitor I spied the communication beetween the freescale application and the board.
In order to start receiving data from the board you have to send a couple of bytes:
Hexadecimal:
0x20; 0x48; 0x54; 0x31; 0x53; 0x31; 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
0x20; 0x48; 0x54; 0x31; 0x53; 0x31; 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
0x20; 0x73; 0x31; 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
0x20; 0x62; 0x37; 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
As you can see, all the messages start with 0x20 and end with 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
From this point the uC will start to send the accelerometer data. Each message starts with 0x20; 0x43 and ends with 0x41; 0x41; 0x0D
Till this point i still haven't time to explore more of the kits commands, but hope to post them here soon.
Best Regards,
Marcos