Stairville DJ-X 16, voided my warranty

The DJ-X 16 is a very basic DMX controller, which I used to test out DMX controlled (d'uh...) LED lights. I cannot recommend it, it lacks a lot of features, and the buttons/faders have a very flimsy feeling. Nevertheless: Because I was pondering if it was worthwhile to modify its firmware, I decided to void the warranty (yeah!) and here are few pictures documenting the insides of this device.

What I found pretty interesting is the fact that, even though I bought it new only a few months ago, and it's still being manufactured exactly like that, it uses pretty antique components, and is an all-through-hole PCB, not a single SMD to be found.

The main controller is a Atmel AT89C55WD, a 8051 compatible 8-bit microcontroller. It's meagre 256 bytes of internal RAM is extended by 8k of High-Speed (120ns...) SRAM. A 29EE010 EEPROM takes care of the 8051's lack of long-term memory. Everything else is 80s-style design, with a lot of 47hc's.

There's a second, smaller, PCB which is home of the SN57176 RS485 driver/receiver, an optocoupler (MIDI out/through), connectors and a 7805 voltage regulator. The flat-ribbon cable connecting this connection-PCB to the main board is nicely labeled on the silkscreen, very convenient.

K1    1   2  COM
K2    3   4  Audio2
K3    5   6  Audio1
k5    7   8  MIDI in
+5V   9  10  +5V
NC    11 12  MIDI through
GND   13 14  GND
+5V   15 16  +5V
NC    17 18  DMX out
+12V  19 20  +12V

From Chris’ Miscellanea

From Chris’ Miscellanea

From Chris’ Miscellanea

Playing with a AM2302 Temperature/Humidity Sensor & LUFA

I played around with a Adsong AM2302 Temperature/Humidity sensor today which has a pretty neat serial interface.

From Chris’ Miscellanea

I wrote some code to read in the data using the input-capture mode of the Timer/Counter1 in a AVR ATmega32u4 (way overpowered, but it's handy on a Olimexino 32U4 board) to learn about using the LUFA USB library a little, maybe someone can put it to actual use?

$ cu -l ttyACM0
Connected.
Triggering conversion.
AS2302 raw bytes: recv cnt=0 01 76 00 fa 71
status: 0, temp=250 (*0.1 dC), rh=374 (*0.1%)

Get /dev/spidev on an Raspberrypi running under Archlinux ARM working again.

Currently, when running a raspberry-pi with the latest kernel available for Archlinux, access to the SPI bus via /dev/spidev no longer works. Bugs have been filed, but apparently the late-binding logic available via spi_register_board_info just seems to be broken right now.

I've written a small kernel module that doesn't fix the initial bug, but just does the binding of spidev to the first two chipselects of the first spi master. It's available on github.


$ ls -la /dev/spidev*
zsh: no matches found: /dev/spidev*

$ sudo insmod rpi_add_spidev_module/rpi_add_spidev_module.ko 

$ dmesg

(...)
[  245.299487] spi_master spi0: ...is the master for device #0.
[  245.299709] spi spi0.0: ...is the device #0.
[  245.299734] spi_master spi0: ...is the master for device #1.
[  245.304763] spi spi0.1: ...is the device #1.

$ ls -la /dev/spidev0.*

crw------- 1 root root 153, 0 Mar  6 16:47 /dev/spidev0.0

crw------- 1 root root 153, 1 Mar  6 16:47 /dev/spidev0.1

# cd /sys/bus/spi/drivers/spidev
# ls -l
total 0
--w------- 1 root root 4096 Jan  1 00:03 bind
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Jan  1 00:02 module -> ../../../../module/spidev
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Jan  1 00:03 spi0.0 -> ../../../../devices/platform/bcm2708_spi.0/spi_master/spi0/spi0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    0 Jan  1 00:02 spi0.1 -> ../../../../devices/platform/bcm2708_spi.0/spi_master/spi0/spi0.1
--w------- 1 root root 4096 Jan  1 00:00 uevent
--w------- 1 root root 4096 Jan  1 00:02 unbind

Using software to talk to a proprietary SPI gyro/accelerometer module works again.

$ sudo ./rpi_gyro /dev/null  

Opened gpio25 direction as fd 5.

Opened gpio25 value as fd 6.

Opened /dev/spidev0.0 as fd 7 (0x03, 8, 0).

Opened /dev/spidev0.1 as fd 8 (0x03, 8, 0).

lsm330dlc_dump_regs: dumping accelerometer registers.

$00: $00 $00 $00 $00   $00 $00 $00 $ff

$08: $00 $00 $00 $00   $00 $00 $00 $33

$10: $86 $16 $a6 $26   $48 $25 $21 $1e

$18: $1b $a3 $50 $65   $c0 $00 $50 $00

$20: $27 $00 $00 $80   $40 $00 $00 $ff

$28: $00 $2d $c0 $01   $40 $27 $80 $9e

$30: $00 $00 $00 $00   $00 $00 $00 $00

$38: $00 $00 $00 $00   $00 $00 $00 $00

lsm330dlc_dump_regs: dumping gyro registers.

$00: $d3 $66 $a8 $cc   $4d $d0 $11 $f1

$08: $20 $06 $ff $18   $02 $83 $00 $d3

$10: $90 $2b $19 $44   $0c $e0 $61 $60

(...)