Greetings fellow netizens and welcome to my first blog post!
My name is Raleigh Illgen and I hope to provide the webz/world at large with some useful OC. I’m an engineer by trade and usually hacking on embedded circuits and code during the day. My intent for this website is to be a catalog of personal projects and armchair computer science philosophy.
The first project I plan on documenting here will be my thousandth attempt at a useful human machine interface. Nothing too fancy or novel. The goal is a wearable accelerometer-based mouse worn on the hand with capacitive touch pads for buttons. The long-term stretch goal is to add an IR Emitter and camera with no IR filter to also provide an absolute position to the interface.
The pcb will be a custom Freescale ARM M0 design. To interface with the host PC, I’ll be using the Nordic nRF8001 Bluetooth Low Energy chip. Nordic’s tranceiver looked like it had a lot of the BT stack built in without compromising the protocol flexibility and the price is very reasonable. For the accelerometer/magnetometer I chose the ST LSM303D. I liked it because it was a combined accelerometer and magnetometer although the current draw seems a little high at 300 uA. Since this will be a battery powered project I have to pay close attention to the system power.
For the software side, I plan on using the free ARM IDE CooCox and purchasing their CoLinkEx v1.1 for dubugging. Originally I planned on using a OLIMEX JTAG ARM-USB-OCD programmer I already had, but unfortunately it doesn’t support SWD interfaces without an additional module which isn’t tested with CooCox.
So that’s the project and the plan. Wish me luck on my new website adventure and thanks for visiting!