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BlinkM and Liquidware Illuminato compatibility?
I'm trying to use a Liquidware Illuminato to program the BlinkM. The board is supposed to be compatible with Arduino and the BlinkMCommunicator compiles and runs without an error. That said, the BlinkM doesn't appear to get power, so I'm guessing there's an issue with either the mapping of the analog pins or the i2c isn't compatible.
I can successfully program the BlinkM via my old Decimilia, but want to use the Illuminato for the extra pins.
Does anyone know if there's a way to get the Illuminato to play nice?
I can successfully program the BlinkM via my old Decimilia, but want to use the Illuminato for the extra pins.
Does anyone know if there's a way to get the Illuminato to play nice?
I’m confused
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Inappropriate?Hi Ric,
The Illuminato uses a very different chip than Arduino, so the drop-in compatibility of certain peripherals can be an issue. This is particularly the case for things like I2C devices like BlinkM. But I think it should work. On the Illuminato, the SDA & SCL pins are in a different location. (On Arduino they do double-duty with Analog In pins 4 & 5).
From looking at the (unfortunately low-rez) schematics of the Illuminato, it looks like the SCL pin is on D21 and the SDA pin is on D22. So you should be able to hook up a BlinkM to it, like this:
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Inappropriate?Thanks for the fast response!
I wired up the BlinkM as per your diagram. As expected, hooking it to power plays the last programmed sequence just fine.
Reloading the BlinkMCommunicator doesn't change the BlinkM behavior, but I'm not sure if it should given that the power doesn't cycle like it would if hooked to A2 & A3 for power.
When I run the BlinkMSequencer the program says it's uploaded, but no change occurs on the BlinkM.
I've contacted Liquidware regarding the issue as well and will post back here with what they say so others may benefit.
Thanks again,
-Ric -
Inappropriate?Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I looked at the datasheet for the ATmega645 (the chip used in the Illuminato) a bit more carefully, and I think you're out of luck for now.
The ATmega645 has different internal hardware for doing I2C, so the standard "Wire" library that all the existing BlinkM Arduino example code uses, including BlinkMCommunicator, depend upon will not work.
Specifically, Arduino has the "TWI" kind of I2C hardware, while the Illuminato has the "USI" kind of hardware. Someone would have to write an alternate Wire library to do USI. This is possible, but it doesn't appear that Liquidware has included that in the "core" download for the Illuminato. (Not that I would expect them to, Wire is sort of optional; and Arduino right now doesn't support the ability to switch libraries based on board type)
Another approach is to use a "software I2C" library which doesn't use any built-in hardware of the chip to do I2C. This is comparable to the "SoftSerial" vs normal Serial that you might have seen. The benefits of this approach is you can use any two digital pins. The downside (right now) is that I don't know of an existing Arduino library that does this. -
Inappropriate?Tod, thank you for your support on this. I really appreciate the effort you've put in to track this down, even if it isn't the news I was hoping for. I can't remember the last time I had a company support experience this good. :)
I think I've got a work around to get the other bits of my project to work using a normal Arduino, so I'll switch to that for now.
I’m thankful
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