Recently, we have been asked several times about driver circuits for IR LEDs, particularly with good range and coverage. Most of us start off driving infrared leds directly from an Arduino or other MCU using a basic resistor in series with the LED connected to a digital output pin of the MCU.
Continue reading Constant current infrared LED emitter circuit
Here are some photos we captured, of a sample of our MCU test rigs and custom PCB for AnalysIR.
The photo above shows some of our test setup for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, TI MSP430 LaunchPad and the (big) baby of them all the USB IR Toy. The small red custom PCBs are ones we had made via Elecrow which worked out great. So instead of just using solderless breadboards we now plug these ‘half shields’ directly into the Arduino header, or in the case of the RPi using a ribbon cable. The USB IR Toy already has the IR receivers on board and doesn’t require this PCB.
We should also be able to hook up the LaunchPad to this board using headers. So once we receive the full set of headers, we ordered on-line, we will have all our test setups much neater and more reliable. Previously, we used solderless breadboards, as can be seen in the photo attached to the LaunchPad. Continue reading Testing AnalysIR with a custom PCB
Today we issued a test release of AnalysIR, supporting V1 & V2 USB IR Toy loaded with firmware V22. If you have an IR Toy and want to test it out, leave a message with your email in the contact form at the top. Naturally, this is available only to backers with AnalysIR. You can support our project and get a copy of AnalysIR via the option at the top of this page.
We received a V2 USB IR Toy last week from Dangerous Prototypes via Seedstudio.
(See early access note for backers below)
After some initial teething problems we set about playing with this new device. Then we went about trying to integrate it into AnalysIR. We found that operating the IR Toy in ‘Sampling Mode’ worked best for our needs. There are several other modes available which are described on the website below. Continue reading AnalysIR integrated support for USB IR Toy