Paul:

I ordered a USB Data Acquisition board from Digikey to use when testing
my HomebrewedGlassPanel. I didn't order the programmable
development/testing board you mentioned, I didn't want to take the time
to learn the language.  So I just ordered a dumb interface board with 20
I/O ports, 14 that can be used A/D.

If I choose to put a custom glass-panel in my project, I think I would
want the control functionality separated as much as possible from the
display-system anyway, so I will not worry about ECU functionality for
now. ...



R. Berglund

Send pictures of the board you ordered and the price.
Did you look at this one?
http://www.hytekautomation.ca/U120816.aspx?productId=1

Paul Lamar


No ... I had not looked at that one.  I spent about 15 minutes surfing
the web, came up with a handful of manufacturers/vendors, but most units
were in the several-hundred-dollar range.  The one I ordered was
$49.95 ... a bit out of my price range, but seems to be fairly easy to
connect to; it requires no additional sockets, I will not need to spend
a weeks worth of days and nights learning how to program the thing.
That should be worth $20 to me

This is the unit:
http://search.digikey.com/us/en/products/DLP-IO20/813-1027-ND/2135093

R.Berglund

Wow that is a bargain. I wonder what CPU chip they are using?
The Linux driver is a huge advantage. The USB port works on Linux.
It has my favorite connectors on it as well.

Hytek comes only with a Windows driver.

IMHO the missing link at the moment is how do you access it on Linux.
It appears you need to write a C program to pipe the data to your TCL
program.

Perhaps a Linux serial terminal program will read
the USB port with high speed serial ASCII data coming in.

Does TCL have a command to read a USB port?

HyTek supplies a windows program that stores the data in a file on the
hard disk in comma delimited form readable by a spread sheet.

Paul Lamar