Tag: adafruit

While banging my head against the wall with debugging my PS/2 keyboard thingy, I really wished I had a dedicated logic analyzer (preferably with PS/2 decoder, but even raw binary data would’ve been fine). So I decided to try out a long hatched idea – combine an ATtiny2313 and FTDI for some unlimited-length logic capturing with a PC. You’ll only need:

1. ATtiny2313
2. 20 MHz crystal and caps (slower will also work, frequency just defines what baud rates you’ll achieve)
3. FTDI USB/serial converter, like the FTDI friend from Adafruit
4. Optionally, some power-stabilizing capacitors, reset pullup and ISP programming header for flashing the firmware

ATtiny2313 is ideal for this, as it has all eight port B pins on one side in numerical order – attaching up to 8 logic lines is really straightforward. With 20 MHz crystal, baud rates close to 1 Mbps can be achieved in fast serial mode. I used Adafruit’s FTDI Friend for really simple (and way faster than most cheap serial adapter dongles) serial to USB conversion – just connect ATtiny RXD pin to TX, and TXD to RX, and you can even get power from the Friend so you’re all set! For crystal and that other stuff, see my ATtiny2313 breadboard header post for schematic, the picture above should fill you in with the rest.

Firmware code

This device has some of the smallest firmware codebases ever (firmware is 128 bytes). All we need to do is to set up UART with desired speed, and have the AVR chip to fire up an interrupt whenever data has been sent, and then use that to send current state of port B (using PINB):

#include <avr/io.h>
#include <avr/interrupt.h>

void USARTInit(unsigned int ubrr_value, uint8_t x2, uint8_t stopbits) { 
  // Set baud rate
  UBRRL = ubrr_value & 255; 
  UBRRH = ubrr_value >> 8;

  // Frame Format: asynchronous, 8 data bits, no parity, 1/2 stop bits
  UCSRC = _BV(UCSZ1) | _BV(UCSZ0);
  if(stopbits == 2) UCSRC |= _BV(USBS);

  if(x2) UCSRA = _BV(U2X); // 2x

  // USART Data Register Empty Interrupt Enable
  UCSRB = _BV(UDRIE);

  // Enable The receiver and transmitter
  UCSRB |= _BV(RXEN) | _BV(TXEN);
}

int main() {
  // 230.4 kbps, 8 data bits, no parity, 2 stop bits
  USARTInit(10, 1, 2); // replace 10 with 4 to get 0.5 Mbps

  sei(); // enable interrupts

  while(1) {}
	
  return 1;
}

ISR(USART_UDRE_vect) {
  UDR = PINB;
}

Continue reading Super Simple 50+ kHz Logic Analysis with ATtiny2313 and FTDI Friend