Ok can anyone tell me just what I have bought ?
Im totaly new to arduinos and amd still learning so how about a bit of input?
LOL I bought a spoke pov kit from Poland that does rgb and has a sd card slot which will hold 16 images and allow me to choose the one I want displyaed ...
Interested to see just what it was I took the battery holder off so I could see the chips and it turns out to be a atmega 168 pu20 combined with a 74ac14 hex inverter with schmidt trigger input ... thats all that is on board other than a voltage regulator a 10 mhz crystal and the odd resistor and cap assosiated with this ,BUT it has a lan port connector and a working sd card slot.
The Lan port is used to connect the control board to the board wich holds the 16 rgb surface mount leds and three shift registers and supplies the power to it as well so Im not sure it has ethernet capability thrugh it or not.
Other than that there are 6 solder pads to one side I am curious to know if they might be where a usb port could be added and it function with no other hardware added ..... is that possible with nothing but a atmega 168 and a 74ac14 ? I would realy love to be able to copy the code that is in the chip and save it so I could build more of these so another question is can that be done ?
For a usb port, you need a usb-serial-ttl adapter.
The Rx and Tx of that adapter can be connected to the pin 0 and 1 of the Arduino (PD0, PD1 of the chip).
But you need also an Arduino bootloader, so you have to make a connector for the MOSI, MISO, RESET, SCK signals to be able to program the chip and load the bootloader.
I don't know the board, are there any numbers on it?
nothing at all on the board other than the company website and their name, it was made by a guy in Poland who has a company called Visiblebiker and is a persistance of vision device for bicycles called the UrbanBiker pov.
I assume it has a bootloader already since it has a been programmed with the sketch to do this and to read the sd card.
It has one 10 mhz crystal, several resistors and diodes and one small transistor on boardthe atmega 168 pu20 and a 714ac14 .
The led board has three mbI5031gf chips and 16 rgb leds and is connected with a lan cable between the two boards.
I bought it thinking I could use it as a learning tool and copy it myself using digital led strips and a adruino uno.
I think the first thing you need is a circuit diagram. Once you've made that you can compare it to a real Arduino and see if your board can be used as an Arduino-substitute.
Ok to be clear it is not a ardunio this is clear ... it consists of two chips a atmega 168 20pu and hex inverter schmidt trigger and a sc card .
I do not want to or plan on turning it into a arduino I just want to know whet the 6 solder pad conections might be for along that one side does anyone have any clue on that ?
I was also wondering if you can read / copy the contents of memory from a atmega chip?
If you have access to the ISP pins, and if the chip has not been protected, then yes you can read out and save the memory contents. However the memory will not contain source code -- it will be machine code, which is much harder (for humans) to read and understand. You could copy it to another chip without difficulty, but modifying it would be very hard.
Without a circuit diagram I cannot speculate on what the solder pads connect to.
Thank you more along the lines of what I wanted to know ....
since it is a pov device and the software they sent me along with it allows me to convert jpg files into images to use with it and stores them on the sd card would the sd card not have to be hooked to the isp lines?
If that is true then the solder tabs might just be lines from the isp ,they had to program it somehow after it was assembled since it is a surface mount chip there has to be a way to do that I assume ...
