Serial Wombat 8B Kickstarter Active
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With a target retail price of only $1.50 per 8 I/O pins in small quantities and cheaper in larger quantities the SW8B is positioned to become an essential component in the Maker's part box, and the best single-choice I2C I/O expander on the market.
8 I/O pins all with Input, output, and ADC, on a 32 bit core capable of running most advanced Serial Wombat 18AB functionality. Pin modes include:
10 Bit A/D conversion, with configurable on-chip digital filtering, averaging, outlier exclusion, linear transformation or scaling, synchronous queuing, and more
PWM output with 17uS resolution at any frequency, (and I may be able to pull off sub-microsecond resolution at 1kHz, I'm still experimenting with that). Unlike Arduino PWMs, these are 100% steady regardless of other functionality. PWM output can be PID controlled within the Serial Wombat board based on another pin's input value.
H Bridge Control functionality that combines two PWM outputs into a single controller. H Bridge output can be PID controlled within the Serial Wombat board based on another pin's input value.
Servo control functionality with on board functionality such as rate of change control, default output on communication timeout, and more. Resolution will be as good or better than Arduino Uno servo control, and unlike Arduino you won't suffer from flutter when doing other things.
PID or Hysteresis control allows the host to offload entire control loops to the Serial Wombat firmware. Generally speaking, any pin mode that produces a numerical input (ADC, frequency input, etc.) can be used to control any output that takes a numerical output (H Bridge, PWM, Servo) with programmable loop frequency and constants.
Quadrature/Rotary Encoder input The Serial Wombat board monitors changes on the encoder and keeps track of its relative position. No more glitchy readings due to missed transitions. The Serial Wombat chip can also provide frequency of change to use as input to a PID loop. Encoder values can be limited to a given range, or change by a specified increment per click. Encoder can be sampled at 1kHz or 57.6kHz with software debouncing for noisy contacts.
Pulse Timer input Pulse timing inputs with 17uS resolution can be used to measure frequency, duty cycle or pulse width. Values can be averaged or filtered, scaled or transformed. This mode is great for reading RC receiver signals.
Debounced Button input offloads button processing to the Serial Wombat firmware. The firmware keeps track of the number of presses and releases, double or triple clicks, and the amount of time a button has been held. This makes creating sophisticated user interfaces easy.
Matrix Keypad decoding offloads the processing of 4x4 or smaller matrix keypads to the Serial Wombat firmware. The results can be read as individual buttons that simulate simultaneous discrete debounced button inputs, as a stream of button indexes, or as a stream of definable ASCII characters.
I2C to UART one full-duplex I/O pair at up to 115200 bps, and up to 6 more RX or TX pins at 19,200 bps (total throughput across all ports limited by I2C bandwidth)
TM1637 Display allows offloading of 7 segment LED digit display and encoding and segment blinking and animation
More pin modes coming in the future including stepper motor control, IR remote decoding, RC PPM input and possible I2C to NeoPixel / WS2812 (feasibility for WS2812 not yet established)