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Thread: Cheap Dac Board With Cpu

  1. #1
    mixedgas's Avatar
    mixedgas is offline Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
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    Default Cheap Dac Board With Cpu

    Already optimized for vector graphics, prgrammable with something free like ponyprog, and 25$ each. two 12 bit dacs and a blanking output

    See:

    http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...oducts_id=8488

    and

    http://www.dutchtronix.com/ScopeClock.htm

    of course we would need to slow things down for galvos, but....
    A dac for 25$ is intreging, even if we have to add ram to it.

    OK, so its best for making a test pattern generator or something, but hey, its cheap, and its a finished product available from 3 suppliers.

    I ordered one.

    Steve Roberts

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    That's pretty nifty. It could be made into a stand-alone ILDA test pattern provider or something like that.

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    Thumbs up

    That is a neat lil piece of "shwag"...
    Love, peace, and grease,

    allthat... aka: aaron@pangolin

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    Quote Originally Posted by mixedgas View Post
    Already optimized for vector graphics, prgrammable with something free like ponyprog, and 25$ each. two 12 bit dacs and a blanking output

    See:

    http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...oducts_id=8488

    and

    http://www.dutchtronix.com/ScopeClock.htm

    of course we would need to slow things down for galvos, but....
    A dac for 25$ is intreging, even if we have to add ram to it.

    OK, so its best for making a test pattern generator or something, but hey, its cheap, and its a finished product available from 3 suppliers.

    I ordered one.

    Steve Roberts
    I also bought one with plans to adopt it to laser display purposes.
    One correction - it hasn't got a blanking output.
    I'm going to do some rev-eng to add it, also to slow the point rate, preferably in regulated manner (most likely via RS232 or ext. pot).

    Steve, got any expirience with Your Dutchtronix kit ?

    Piotr.K

  5. #5
    mixedgas's Avatar
    mixedgas is offline Creaky Old Award Winning Bastard Technologist
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    i've been in and out of the hospital, and forgot I had one. I will build it today. you can reprogram it with ponyprog, so I see no problems in slowing it down. steve

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    Actually I see it has the inverted intensity output, so if we negate it inside firmware it should work as blanking.
    As for the slowing down - one attitude would be pausing after each XY pair sent to DAC. This way blanked sweeps wouldn't get slowed down. But is appears that we need major slowing down, like 1 to 10, I think. Just NOPs might not do the trick, especially if delay should be regulated.
    Piotr.K

  7. #7
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    I ran across an interesting development kit a few weeks ago. It's $99 for the kit - $50 for just the board - it uses a C8051f120 microcontroller running at 50 MHz - has 64 digital i/o pins accessable via a 96 pin euro connector - 2, 12 bit D/As - 8, 8 bit A/Ds - 128kb of flash ram - 8k of scratch ram - 5 programable counters - 2 comparitors - an integrated ide - sample programs include a quadrature osc running off of one of the programable counters at 1000 hz - and a 16x16 bit multiplier that takes 2 clocks... If you want a stand alone programmable thingy it's pretty cool. Oh and it's static so you can slow it down and speed it up to minimize current draw - not a big deal for lasers shows - but great for some bread and butter apps...

    https://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/...051F120DK.aspx

    brian

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