Jonathan Broadwell’s Newest Serial Wombat Presents a Wealth of Options Over I2C — for Simply $1.50

Maker Jonathan Broadwell, creator of the Serial Wombat household, is again with one other board design — this time the Serial Wombat 8B (SW8B), an enter/output enlargement board that provides a wealth of options to any I2C-compatible microcontroller or microprocessor host for simply $1.50.

“The Serial Wombat 8B is an I2C peripheral that gives good I/O enlargement to unravel frequent interfacing issues — ADC [Analog to Digital Converter], PWM [Pulse-Width Modulation], servo, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output], rotary encoder studying, H-bridge interfacing, and extra,” Broadwell explains. “It has a separate microcontroller that may offload annoying or interrupt intensive I/O duties out of your important board. It is open-source firmware operating on a reasonable [WCH Electronics] CH32V003 microcontroller. The {hardware} designs are open-source {hardware}.”

The most recent within the rising Serial Wombat household, the SW8B relies across the WCH CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller famed for its spectacular capabilities at a particularly low price. These capabilities are used to the total in Broadwell’s design, which is a breadboard-friendly design with a pre-programmed firmware made to cowl a broad vary of use-cases — all options of which can be found on all pins, and easily activated by the host over an I2C connection.

These options are, in full: a 10-bit analog to digital converter with filtering, averaging, outlier exclusion, linear scaling, and synchronous queuing options; a 17µs-resolution pulse-width modulation output; an H-bridge controller, which mixes two PWM outputs into one; a servo controller with rate-of-change management and a decision “similar to Arduino UNO servo management,” Broadwell guarantees; proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and hysteresis management mode operating on-chip; quadrature and rotary encoder enter; pulse timer enter; matrix keypad decoding; I2C to UART bridge; TM1637-based seven-segment LED management; and offloaded button debouncing. Extra options are to return in future firmware updates, Broadwell guarantees, together with stepper motor management, radio-control PPM enter, and infrared distant decoding.

In brief, the Serial Wombat 8B is a tiny multitool that can be utilized to work round a scarcity of options in a selected microcontroller or microprocessor, to increase on current options, or to dump work in an effort to liberate the host for different duties. Libraries are included for Arduino C++, Python and MicroPython, and C#, whereas Broadwell’s personal “Wombat Panel” software program gives an accessible interface for experimentation and might auto-generate Arduino-compatible code.

Broadwell is funding manufacturing of the Serial Wombat 8B on Kickstarter, with rewards beginning at $10 for a five-pack and dropping beneath a goal $1.50-per-board retail worth in increased quantity; the maker has additionally unveiled different board designs based mostly on the identical chip and firmware, together with the SW8B “Backpack Board”, SW8B “Grip” robotics board, SW8B “Bridge” motor controller board, and the SW8B “Crazy8” — eight SW8Bs in a single, offering 64 “good pins” on a single board. “I do not suppose there’s something on the market like this,” Broadwell says of this latter design.

All {hardware} is predicted to ship in August this 12 months, Broadwell says.