Teensy USB Development Board - 16MHz, $19

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

by andreyf • 17 years ago

110 58 17 years ago

dcurtis• 17 years ago

What practical use does this serve? Just for fun hacking?

For anything of significant use, I think you need something like the Beagle Board (beagleboard.org) or a Gumstix. Anyone know of any others?

paulgb• 17 years ago

Arduinos seem pretty popular around here (http://arduino.cc/), but I think they fall under the "just for fun hacking" category.

Once adafruit (http://adafruit.com/) gets the starter kit (http://is.gd/4sRs) back in stock, I'm going to order one for myself.

davi4• 17 years ago

Looks like fun to me.

I know very little about hardware hacking but I had an idea the other day: I wanted to rig a mini-stoplight up (green, amber, red LEDs) that I could plug into my computer's USB port and hit hot keys to change which LED was lit.

Then my wife could look over and see if I was super-focused or not. When I was thinking about code or trying to do science writing, I would toggle the thing to the red LED; when I was screwing around on HN, I would toggle it to green.

I looked around naively but couldn't find something small & easy. This product could maybe fit the bill nicely.

Whether my wife would appreciate such a thing is another matter. :)

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

This can be taken one step further to create a hacker-wife-trainer. Add a water pistol, a microphone and a stepper motor to the set up. Audio signal in wife's frequency range when LED is in red should trigger water pistol in the appropriate direction.

coryrc• 17 years ago

Fold a piece of paper into a triangular prism.

Color and write text on it.

Turn so appropriate color is facing outward

Voilà.

Xichekolas• 17 years ago

Bonus if you write some code to detect your activity (based on active application or typing/clicking patterns or who knows what) and then communicate via usb to your stoplight.

At that point, you could probably sell the thing on thinkgeek.com and watch cubicles everywhere fill up with activity indicators. Of course, there would have to be manual override, so cube workers could set it to red all day when they don't feel like doing anything.

cardboardbox• 17 years ago

Or maybe you could even rig it up to light up based on what programs were active on your computer.

IDE/text edit open -> red light, web browser -> yellow, game -> green.

noodle• 17 years ago

i've been using a butterfly, myself, which is what i learned on and know the best. plus, it does a good bit of stuff.

kragen4• 17 years ago

The boards you're suggesting use a lot more power and provide a lot more computation power than the AT90USB162. This has 21 I/O lines. You could drive H-bridges for five stepper motors off of it, or a 14-digit LCD display, or an 8-digit LCD display and a 3×3 keypad, etc. It doesn't have an ADC but with a little external electronics you could easily use it to digitize signals from e.g. thermistors or pressure sensors or tilt sensors. You can run it from USB power, and USB power adapters are cheap and widely available. You can generate voice-quality audio using PWM, although I don't think you have enough CPU power to synthesize voice in real-time; you'd have to be reading it off a flash chip or a network or something.

If you want to build a white-LED-driven stroboscope to check your engine timing, or get fault codes out of your OBD-II, or sound an alarm when the air conditioner is on and the window is open, or control your five-axis robot, etc etc etc., something like this is ideal.

Atmel has a set of application notes for the chip at http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/app_notes.asp?part_id=4097 that show some example things you can do with it.

ars3• 17 years ago

I know you can make a DAC by using pulse width modulation.

Can you do that in reverse? i.e. make an oscillator who's frequency depends on the input (resistance presumably), then each time the oscillation goes above a certain voltage it would trigger a digital 'on' signal (edge trigger I guess). Count how many of those you get per time, and you have an ADC.

Would that work?

sh1mmer2• 17 years ago

Fun hacking = prototyping.

This is a great way to test ideas on the cheap.

wheels• 17 years ago

Since modern motherboards don't have serial / parallel ports, it seems like something like this would still let people get their feet wet with basic electronics hacking. A simple example that we did back in my day was to build our own TI-LINK cables for the parallel port with $5 in Radio Shack parts rather than the $40 for the cable.

When I saw this I also started thinking of connecting it to a relay for lighting applications. It'd be fun at a party to connect this to a set of relays and lamps and drive it from the output of a beat detection algorithm. Or to have it automatically dim the lights in the living room when the PVR computer starts a movie.

HeyLaughingBoy4• 17 years ago

I just quoted someone about $3k to develop a simple datalogger that among other things needs to read a few switches through a USB connection. This would be perfect for that. Basically I would just need to get one of these, add connectors for the switch inputs, put it in an industrial enclosure along with a mini ITX mobo and write a few lines of code and I'm golden. It will save me a few hours of development time over using an FTDI chip and I can pocket that difference. Money changes hands and everyone's happy!

lacker• 17 years ago

In a few years, naming the product "Teensy" will seem ironic.

akd• 17 years ago

Not really. Further shrinking of that board is constrained by the number of I/O pins required, whose size cannot shrink because of the limitations of human solderers.

zain• 17 years ago

In a few years, your comment will seem ironic too ;)

dbul2• 17 years ago

I was just about to look for a brain for my robot. Excellent! The only concern I have is that the AVR is soldered down; it won't do unless there is a socket.

jws5• 17 years ago

I don't think any of the AVR USB microcontrollers come in a DIP format. Sockets for the available formats tend to be pricey, large (relatively), and not a good choice for high vibration environments.

Why do you worry about being soldered down? I suppose if you are going to accidentally blow the chip it is a cheaper repair, but with a cheap hot-air unit and the video tutorials at SparkFun you should be able to replace that chip if you like. (You will have to figure out how to load the initial bootloader if it is different from the one supplied by AVR, but AVR's is sufficient.)

If you do blow a pin, it probably isn't a total loss. I was winging a little change to just such a processor and ran a 24v line to a digital pin. The pin stopped working, but the rest of the chip continued just fine. The moral is for prototyping you can just use different pins, learn your lessons, and your final deployed unit should be fine.

HeyLaughingBoy4• 17 years ago

And with proper design you won't blow the chip. Let me rephrase: with proper design, the only thing that will blow the chip will blow the entire board!

Even so, if you do it's only $19!

dbul2• 17 years ago

Because it isn't necessary for my robot to carry around a programming board. If I come up with another application that uses a microcontroller, I have to pay for another USB programming board/AVR combo.

kragen4• 17 years ago

Awesome! How do you use it in Linux?

samlittlewood3• 17 years ago

http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/loader_linux.html

kragen4• 17 years ago

Great, thanks! I wonder if there's a free-software approach too.

ComputerGuru2• 17 years ago

Can this device communicate via USB during runtime or is the USB port only there for programming purposes?

ComputerGuru2• 17 years ago

To answer my question:

The Teensy's USB port is multi-purpose. If the HalfKay bootloader is activated (via a push-button on the board), the USB port is used for firmware-manipulation purposes. HalfKay lives on the EEPROM.

Once the device is powered off then on, the USB port is used as a normal communication device and can be fully utilized to speak with the PC or other USB peripherals. USB communication code is in your program and lives on the FLASH.

jodrellblank• 17 years ago

"If your Teensy is not brand new, it will run whatever program the previous owner loaded, perhaps causing your computer to recognize new hardware and require drivers. Just cancel any driver setup. In the next step you will load the LED blink program."

So, yes - looks like it can.

goodgoblin• 17 years ago

I wonder if this can be used to create Halloween Haunting effects - i.e. playing a sound when an IR trigger is ...triggered. I would love to embed something like that in a scarecrow with a crazy mask sitting on my front porch in a rocking chair. Kids come up - trip the IR - and the eyes light up and it says 'Happy Halloween MUHAHAAHAHA!!!!.

mattmichielsen• 17 years ago

It definitely can.

jws5• 17 years ago

Well fine. If you are going to sell me one laid out better than I managed and assembled for less than I can have the board fabricated and the parts purchased for a lot of 10 then I'll just have to buy your product instead.

I was close though. About 10% larger in area.

mbowcock• 17 years ago

I've used these in the past - http://www.ti.com/msp430 - I believe they have lower power requirements than the AVR (at the expense of less memory). Does anyone know if the AVR has a external memory controller?

jws5• 17 years ago

That AVR does not, but they come in other variants with much more memory and ones that allow external memory (though at the expense of many pins).

sh1mmer2• 17 years ago

I heard way more people doing stuff with the Arduino.

Do people know how Teensy and Arduino compare?

I do know that Arduino is 100% Open Source which is why so many cottage electronic outfits provide them premade.

jws5• 17 years ago

Comparing to arduino:

* Teensy has a native USB, much faster than the USB/serial bridge of an Arduino. I also find the discrete transaction nature of USB easier for communication, though good old fashioned serial is easier for many people to integrate on the host side.

* Arduino has analog inputs, the chip in Teensy does not. If you need analog you can either add an analog converter chip, or go ghetto and use a digital pin, a resistor, and a capacitor and time how long it takes to recharge after you flush the charge. Drawbacks abound.

* Arduino is a complete environment tailored to easy uptake. This is the most important point of Arduino. You can take someone who does not know what a compiler is, and in minutes they can be in control of hardware. The brilliance of Arduino does not show in the bullet list, it is brilliance by omission.

nas• 17 years ago

Neat. I've had good luck with Olimex stuff, for example http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i... . You need to buy a parallel, usb, or serial programmer as well but that's a one time cost.

Devilboy• 17 years ago

Could anyone recommend a cheap, small GPS unit that would work with this?

Teensy USB Development Board - 16MHz, $19

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