Re: Newbie Recommendation

Jack Klein wrote: 
Actually, since you mention both analog signals and servo control, and
you come from a 32-bit background, take a look at TI's C28xx family of
DSPs.

Ever since I played with my first TI-8x calculator, I've always wanted to learn how to program on the TI CPU. They were always incredibly fast and --as I understood it-- had great floating point capability. The thing that always steered me away from these processors, however, is that they were always priced more than double that of other processors I was considering.

16 analog channels for ADC, quadrature encoder inputs (if needed), and
up to 12 PWM outputs, can drive six brush DC motors or two 3-phase
motors simultaneously.

The thing here that caught my eye is that you mention quadrature encoder inputs. If I'm not mistaken, this is how a ball mouse works, right? The reason I ask is because at an instrument company I used to work for, they developed robots that had to detect both direction of movement, as well as provide the ability to "count" the number "steps" in any direction that an arm was moved (intentionally moved with software or unintentionally moved by a foreign object forcing the arm to move). As far as I know, the engineers just simply used the analog channels available on the processor (I could be wrong). Is this possible? If so --and you don't mind a little explanation-- how exactly do you benefit from having a quadrature encoder input? Does it simplify the processes or is this the only way to detect such movements? Basically, what I'm wondering is whether or not it's possible to implement the same design using the analog channels (possibly with a little more work).

I could potentially have a project (in the distant future, of course) that would require quadrature encoder inputs, so this is a very interesting find, for me. Naturally, all this assumes that I'm even talking about the right thing ;-).

Has SPI built in, not I2C, but you might be able to do I2C with the
McBSP serial peripheral.  Check the app notes.

As of now, I2C isn't really a big concern of mine. I probably only mentioned it because it was something I recognized from editing the Linux kernel configuration for my system and knowing that it provided the ability to read temperature and fan speed for various devices in my PC. I have seen some pretty cool I2C devices online, such as ultra-sonic range finders, and such. For now, though, I prefer to implement these peripherals on the analog channels.

Thank you much for your response.

--
Sean
.