Hi Today we're going to take a look at the Texas Instruments TAA C Series Connected Launchpad It's one of these super cheap Internet of Things development boards now TI of course. Uh, about four odd years ago or so released the original Launchpad at $430 it was absolutely insane at Price this one's almost as insane. It's only 20 bucks even from uh, the likes of Digi key and other. Distributors Absolutely incredible.

For what you get in here, it must almost be cost price practically. Uh, they're freaking giving these things away. Unbelievable. Anyway, Um, so I get the part number right.

It's got one of these ridiculously long part numbers. It's the EK Tm4 c294, XL Whoop-de-doo Why do I have to give them such freaking long part numbers? I Don't know. Anyway, it's the Connected Launchpad and um, it's got a whole bunch of uh, powerful stuff built in 120 MHz 32bit Arm Cortex M4 uh processor in it, 1 mega flash memory 256k of SRAM uh 6K of E Prom. It's got an E uh, 10100 Ethernet Mac and fi on it and it's got uh, data protection CNC timers, two 12bit, uh 2 Meg sample per second adcs on it.

Yeah, that sounds impressive, but I don't know. We'll have to check the data sheet for that because it might be 12 bits. but eh, what's the effective number of bits? How good is it really? I don't know. Usually the ones built into these micros aren't that crash hot but still 12bit ADC at 2 Meg samples per second.

Fantastic! It's got Pwm It's got USB serial coms. It's got um, Ke 32-bit code limited C compiler as well as the I 32k uh C compiler as well. So yeah, limited 32k. but you can probably do a whole bunch of useful stuff in that it comes with a starter guide and apparently pre-programmed for with an Internet of Things application so you can just hook it up supposedly out of the box and it just works as an Internet of Things demo Will it? I Don't know.

Let's try it. So what do we get in the Box Well, let's have a look. We get a quick start guide which we'll take a look at. We get the board ESD wrap for your protection.

Um, and we get one of these ridiculous, badly designed uh pool ethernet cables oh I hate those things. um oh they you kind of sort of convenient for travel and things like that otherwise pain in the ass and a yet another uh micro USB cables. if I didn't already have enough and you get a relatively fair amount here for your 20 bucks, we've got the main TI processor of course that's the Arm Cortex uh M4 that's actually what you're are paying for. We've got ourselves a little Pulse Transformer here for your Uh 10100 Ethernet of course, and we've got a couple of switches around here doing various uh things, couple of jumpers for various uh configuration stuff, and you also get a debug, uh and uh SL programming interface over here So you got yourself a little debug header, tiny little pitch and you've got two booster pack connections here.

that's their term for uh, you know the add-on boards and they got a whole bunch I like how they've uh, labeled the signals on the back there. That's really nice and uh, we got ourselves a MAC address and supposedly comes already pre configured as I said. with that Internet of Things applications. Well, it seems the quick start guide doesn't entirely suck.

Um, we've got a board overview here and uh, we' got ourselves the uh, debug and power port. It's powered from the USB port here. it's got like no terminal doesn't look like it's got any terminal connections for external. uh Power you have to sort of use that micro USB I think um, although it does have a power select jumper here, so I'm not sure what's going on there I don't see any other big uh tabs.

Oh, that's right. You can get a battery pack attachment for the booster so you can come in. Your power can come in via the booster connectors apparently. so uh, that's probably what that switch in there.

A couple got a couple of user leads and iOS and user switches and wake and reset switch and uh yeah, that's about all. Not a huge amount on there. It's designed of course to have all the plug-in uh booster packs. We got ourselves a pretty funky looking IO map here for the two booster pack connectors.

It's kind of weird how they've sort of like staggered them I assume that that is the other side of that connector there and oh yeah, like you know I don't know, how does that sort of match up to that kind of thing? I've got to assume that sort of that one. There is that row there and that column. yeah, that one's that one and so on. So anyway, I that wasn't great.

Would have been nice to have a photo in there. but anyway, Um, here we go. Here's are our basic steps for Connect connecting up our Internet of Things demo I'm going to follow through those and see if it works or will it be a donkey. Just a quick look at these jumpers here: I do like how they've uh, labeled those.

There we go. Power Select Power can come from the booster pack USB on the go or the in circuit. uh, debugger you? You generally wouldn't power it from the uh in circuit debugger in system use of course, but uh yeah, that's really nice. Uh, 3.3 volt jumper for the uh, microcontroller here.

That's nice assuming that that disconnects all the power from there. That's really useful cuz then you can put your current meter in there or your microcurrent whatever and measure your uh current consumption of your CPU So that could be really nice. I got another 3.3 volt uh jumper over here I'm not sure what that one's actually uh doing, but uh yeah, it's handy to be able to get in there and measure your power consumption on these uh development boards and just a quick one. Here is an example of where burden voltage on your multimeter to measure current causes an issue.

Let's actually probe this thing I've taken the jumper off okay and watch the leads down there. You'll see that that lead is it. Barely like it's not functioning. It's not powering up as it should, right? but if I connect it over to the amps Jack here and do the same thing Bingo it Powers up no problems whatsoever and starts to operate because it obviously the burden voltage of the meter was too high and it was dropping the voltage to the microcontroller couldn't operate properly at that particular current.

And of course you switch over to the Amps range and everything's hunky dory And that's the leads that I expect when it actually runs the thing. So there you go. That's just a little example of Burden voltage Taada Okay, step number one: go to TI EXO Site.com Uh TI have partnered with Exosite I don't think I'd heard of Exosite before but yet another one of the countless Internet of Things uh like online Cloud type services company that are popping up to get all your stuff connected anyway. They got a couple of uh tutorials and things like that here, but we've got to sign up.

create an account here so I won't bore you with the details. We'll come back All right. I Created an account and the stupid thing asked you to put in like a really secure part password I put in like my standard just dumbass password for sites like this and it just wouldn't accept not secure enough. Screw you G and I hate that sort of crap.

anyway. um yeah, I logged in, it gave me the email thing I had to verify my email but yeah and it gives you. apparently gives you uh 3 free SMS test messages or something you the exosite system can apparently send you SMS messages when your data from this device meets certain conditions and stuff like that to alert you and you get 30 for free and after that I don't know how much it cost. Anyway, all right here we go.

We're going to click here to add a new device to our portal and let's see. here we go. These are all the connect Launchpad connected Launchpad There we go that ridiculous part number and that's the one I Want to? Yep, uh, continue. set it up, enter your Mac address and here we go.

We got to give it a name I'm going to call it Bruce good on you Bruce and we're in Sydney Australia not Austria Let's go through and blah has successfully Ena with the cik, whatever the hell that is your device is connected to the ecosite platform within 24 hours. provision. request What's that garbage? Ah yeah, whatever. let me play with it.

add device no, that's it. We're already done. so let's go home and there we go. Bruce there's Bruce active on active event nothing I guess now I have to plug it in, it's all plugged in I only have one uh USB port in fact I had to take off my little Bluetooth dongle didn't have any and uh bloody, so many USB connected bloody devices and uh I only have one spare Port left on my uh ethernet switch as well so it's all plugged in.

Let's see if the sucker Works Righto come on. Bruce you can do it. mate. Here we go.

let's click on Bruce and and we're in. We're in online. It's been online time. Okay, it's got an online counter that's pretty good.

Junction Temperature of the device uh of the presumably like it's just got an onr on chip transistor. um, you know P Junction silicon diode temperature sensor. They're pretty crew but they do the job and uh, 2 minutes and 8 seconds has been online. actually.

see if I can heat up that chip, see if it changes? Hang on I'll put my finger on it I Got my finger finger on it and we got a graph of the junction temperature there and uh no, no, got a bit of noise on that, you know In fact, we got a lot of noise on that thing. Anyway, that's the junction temperature and that's all it's displaying at the moment. Next waiting for device: H Oh there you go. There are 989 launch pads connected around the world.

Look at that. Any in Australia a I Tell you what? Am I the only one in Sydney you? no, there's two. There's two. Can you believe it? Two in Sydney one there and one Oh in Glee Somebody in Gle's got one good on you and I'm in.

uh well. I I just put Sydney as my sub I didn't know that you could actually put in a That's right, it did ask for a you could put in an exact GPS location of the thing so I could go in there and edit my account. I'm sure an update that but I just put in a generic Sydney So it's just showing smack in the middle of, uh, one of the main arterial roads leading to the Sydney Harbor Bridge there's a Sydney Harbor Bridge for those who don't geographically know. Sydney The opera house is just there and uh, yep, that's smack on one of the one of the overpasses there leading to the Harbor Bridge Awesome! And here we go.

Yes, I do have the launch pad under my desk here cuz of the tiny short little USB cable provided and stuck in the back to my machine and uh, please forgive the crudity of that uh video quality. Anyway, look I can, uh, turn the lead that they were both on before and turn them off? They should be off I can't see it. it's actually under my desk. but I have no reason to believe that is not that lead is not switching off and on.

There we go. I'll switch it on again and Woohoo! That was terribly exciting. What happens if we touch the switch? anything? Nope. Zip.

And if we press the buttons here there we go. Let's have a look. three button pushes and the other one. Let's wait.

It takes a while for that counter to update. I Think yeah, there we go. It does take a while. so I'm going to press those really quick and see if it buffers those button presses and then so I'm going to do the one on the Uh left here I'm going to hit it three times real quick.

1 2, 3 will it jump up to 10? Let's find out it did. There you go. Okay, so that's not bad at all. So they've properly, uh, debounced those and uh, and actually buffered those I'm not sure how quickly it updates the uh, probably, you know, like it polls it probably every second or something.

PS the board. That's typical for these intern of Uh things devices anyway. so let's check out a few other things on here. I'm going going down to the portal uh menu down here: on the left hand side and uh, here's my portal Resorts Summary: and yeah, there's no SMS limit I was wrong on that I didn't completely read the email to get your 30 SMS Uh, free SMS Things You've got to fill out a stupid freaking survey.

a Unbelievable. Anyway, it can send 10 email daily. um as part of the service for free? I guess. but I I don't know about the prices and the plans for this thing I Don't know? Check that out for yourself and uh, shares.

We're only allowed a certain number of you know these things based on our current plan. But anyway, look portal roles. It looks like you can enter a uh view. You can enter viewers managers presumably it is, uh, public viewable I've got to set that up if it is.

I'll link it in down below. If you can actually see and you can see the I'll leave it running and you'll be able to see my um connected Launchpad I'll leave it up there for like, leave it connected for the next couple of days or something like that. unless I can find something useful for it. Um, but there you go.

You can invite users and have them hook up and roll of a manager or a viewer. I Don't know exactly what's going on there, but it sounds quite comprehensive. Then we got some scripts. Let's go in here and check this out.

Bruce Alert manager Handler Waiting waiting for something? Okay, well I guess we can set up scripts for all you script kitties out there. Fantastic! I'm sure it's actually quite, uh, quite powerful. and it's um, it's all TI branded here of course, but it's not actually using TI's um, website, it's actually using Exosite. Of course, it's just a subdomain there on the Exosite website.

So this all this. backend, all this backend, front end uh, stuff is all powered by exosite. so presumably you don't need a uh Texas Instruments device to use exosite. You can hook up any Internet of Devices thing that you want there and uh, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to um I might have to try and get fill out this stupid survey to get my free Sms's cuz I want to like push the button on this thing and set it up and then uh, you know, get it to send me an SMS based on um, this is all current data Junction Gam stape, whatever that is.

Oh yeah, by the way, when I signed up for this thing, it allowed me to choose a time zone. Fantastic. but it did not have Bloody Sydney listed there are you me? All it had was Bloody Brisbane or Perth or something like that. Yeah, correct time zone.

But ah, give me a break, don't want to be bloody Brisbane Bloody Queenslanders. Well well, well look what we have here. what the hell is this com surrogate has stopped working? What the hell is the Comm surrogate? close the program? Shockwave Flash may be busy. Oh what the hell? Unbelievable.

Continue. No, it's just it's crashed. Unbelievable. What a Hipp of garbage.

What the hell's going on? Oh maybe I don't have the latest Shockwave Flash Plugin I'm sure I updated that the other bloody week when it popped up and annoyed me about it. a This is just a all right. it just spat the dummy and we're back. I Don't know what happened there, but check.

Check this out if we click on Junction temperature. Look what's pops up here the graph of the junction temperature. This looks really quite powerful and uh, there's our device. Bruce and uh, you can do calculations and all sorts of stuff.

D I'm well I You would have to spend hours to sit down and try and study exactly what this EXO site thing's capable of, but this looks pretty powerful and all the data loging stuff is there. delete data source, share data. So so I can, uh, share it with people or download it. Presumably that's really quite neat and uh, same thing will happen if I click on the lead one, no doubt.

Yep. so we can get data for the leads, see how many times the leads turned off and on, or the user switch, or anything else that you want to set up. Not bad now. I've actually come back the next day I shut down my machine uh well.

I didn't shut it down overnight but I uh put it to sleep mode I normally do overnight so I came came back today and look it's Now offline I had to log back in. it had sort of logged me out from the EXO site thing but it says Bruce is offline here and like I don't know what the deal is, it hasn't like automatically free refreshed. my board is still powered up. it's still plugged into my Ethernet connection.

Um, by the way, my internet connection was shut down overnight though because my ISP was doing an upgrade. uh thing. so maybe that has something to do with it. but Gez I would have expected it to automatically reconnect anyway.

There are flashing lights still on the board and is powered up I haven't physically touched it since then, so not sure what's going on there at all. And the strange part here is on this main home screen here. look, it says active on active event no So I assume I thought that active on would have meant that it's it's physically online, but it's not. Look status offline.

All I'm going to do is well rep the board and see what happens here. We go there we go. I've repowered the board and by the way I am still getting that uh com 2 surrogate Eror or whatever it damn well is. Here we go.

Yep, it's appeared online, so has the board done something weird when it lost the internet connection? Has it lost locked up or something like that? perhaps? Um, because I definitely do know my internet connection went down last night, so but geez, you'd expect it to be robust enough to to handle that sort of thing and recover. That's what you need from Internet of Things anyway. um I don't know. need to hear back on that whether that's a bug or not.

All right now. I'm going to assume that the error that virtual com error message that keeps uh, popping up is due to, uh, the fact that I haven't installed the Um drivers for the virtual Comm serial. Port So it tells you that in the uh quick start. Well, it tells you to download this in the quick start guide.

So I will and I'll be back. Ah I Really hate drivers like this that just come a zip file a you've got to unzip them and then it's just the driver files. It doesn't actually give like an install or anything like that. So I've got to go through the manual process of bloody installing the driver.

What a pain in the ass. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is going to try and add an event here. So if I click, add an event I want to get this thing to email me when I push the button? Okay, something incredibly simple like that I can't get the SMS uh to work yet because I filled in that survey thing and you have to wait like 24 to 48 hours before your credits come through on your SMS stuff. And oh goodness.

Anyway, so user switch one. So let's see what we can do with user switch one here event name. You know we'll just call it switch or something like that and uh, I don't know. Simple, Yeah.

Timeout? Okay, that's not bad. You can count after a certain number of counts. That's pretty good you can do if then. until right? Okay, that's pretty good.

That looks really quite nice. I Like that interface. All right. What we've got here is, we've set up that event now.

It separates events from alerts here and that makes sense really. So what we've done is, we've set up this event called Switch. which all it does. Very simple that if if I press the switch I just uh.

guessed that the constant was one here and I was correct and then it basically uh, you can do more complex constructs than that. but I just uh. set that and you can see I've already pressed the switch once and it has detected it so one occurrence in the last seven days. So now we should be able to set up an email alert or some other alert here that is then associated with that event called Switch.

Let's try it. so let's do that. ADD Alert here. Reference: Event Source And by the way: I haven't read any documentation for any of this.

I'm just winging this first time user stuff. so switch on. Bruce If we had more than one event, it would have showed up and we had more than one event on more than one device. then presumably they would all show up there.

So the switch. There we go. Let's alert name Dave switch Email and alert interval in seconds. no repeat.

Okay email. So the alert where email send David EV Blog and we'll just call it Bruce Switch. There we go and submit. and now I'm going to try that and see if that enter a numerical alert numerical value Hang on.

Whoa. Alert Interval: zero Okay, forced to put that in there we go submit. So now should email me that if I push the button woohoo and I'll tell you what. these com sorry get error messages getting really annoying.

They keep popping up like every couple of minutes. Oh infuriating. Anyway, I'm going to push the button reaching under the desk. Here we go and I've pushed the button.

It could take a sec a couple of seconds to uh, update that because it's not a push I don't think it's a push thing I think it's uh pulled I'm not sure Occurrences: Come on. come on, don't make a fool out of me. Come on, you can do it. You can do it.

No. Do I have to re. It popped up much quicker than this last time. It really did.

It popped up within a few seconds. So what what? Not sure what's going on there? Well, it might have been that com surrogate error message. bloody thing. I'll just refresh the entire page and uh, not false active.

What's going on? What's going on? I don't know false as in I don't get it? Well, if I go back into the event here, it now knows that it's associated with this alert here, so that's rather nice. But I have no idea why it's going false and I'm pressing the switch and it's not showing up I don't know what do I have to do? Reboot the bloody board again. Okay, now what I've done is I just deleted this entire event and started from scratch again I couldn't figure it out. so now it's active true and I'm pretty well.

Look, it's got one occurrence already. Oops. I haven't pushed it. Let's try it again anyway.

and I set it and it deleted the alert as well the associated alert. So anyway, I've reset it up. Let me push the button. there we go.

I just pushed it and will it pop up. it should because it's active right? So it did last time yet. No, nothing yet. A Come on.

I'm obviously doing something stupid right. It's got to be me. It's got to be a pebcak now. I Tried looking at the various uh tutorials and well, the tutorial, videos and stuff like that and it basically stops at that uh, main dashboard type screen.

It doesn't go into the events and how to actually uh, script those and things like that, but I'm into the device information screen here and I think I've got it. Figured it out. Look down here. User switch number one.

I've pressed it twice and sure enough enough, it's like a counter thing. It's not. It doesn't seem to be. well, that's the actual value right? Let me press it again and I have to refresh here, but it should pop up as three.

There it is. So when I maybe that's the reason why that event thing is maybe caught up in a loop or something like that. That's the only thing I can think of here. if I go into events over here.

Um, because that number is no longer. um I thought it' go from one when it's pushed to zero, back down to zero. but maybe it's not like that value there. So I don't know.

All right now I just got switched to to work I set up a second one and I just pressed it and sure enough it did come up live. Let's see what happens if I press it again. Oh goodness, here we go. I've pressed it a second time.

Will it actually come up with a second occurrence there? No Let me refresh it. No. Now it's active. It's now it's gone false again.

What the hell? Yeah. Okay, that's the event. I So it's got to be that number not going back to0 because look if comparison is true, then enter event. Okay, until comparison is not true I expect it to go back to zero when you release the switch.

I've got to be doing something dumb surely. but I don't know I've had a look at the page and I've looked at the fact and I've had a look at a few things. This demo here, which doesn't show anything only goes to the dashboard I don't know I think I'm going to give up anyway. On the positive side here: look: I did actually get the email in my inbox I did get one an hour ago which was the original one.

then I deleted that one, deleted that uh event. um, an item and then I created another one and I had hello. Dave So it does actually work. it is sending the email but Bugg it if I can figure out how to H why it's not doing what, look here we go.

Something going on here, but why it's not doing what I expect I Got no idea. All right. On the positive side here. after installing uh, two different drivers here, well, uh, manually, two different ones I finally got the Uh Stellaris virtual serial Port it didn't install first.

it installed these ones first and then had to install this separately. Anyway, there's a virtual serial Port which uh, hooks up to the Uh code already running inside the uh Launchpad and here here you go: I am connected 115 uh K board and there you go. we can play that uh tic-tac-toe game. So Tic Tac to we're running, play locally, play online.

There you go. so hopefully uh, remote user starts. So I'm going to do that and the remote user can start waiting for the remote player to see if it can access presumably it's accessing the Uh EXO site server and uh, it's waiting just thinking I don't know so we can leave that off screen and we can go in here and we can. uh oh, here we go.

Something Something happened, Something happened to Bruce waiting. No still waiting for remote player. So anyway, that is supposed to pop up here and uh oh no, there we go. That was me.

There you go I didn't put X in the center Square Oh no, fail and enter row there there we go. Okay, so yeah, I can go like one and then one and boom it should. Wai in for the remote play. it should.

My one should pop up here. although I've got to manually refresh that. There we go, it popped up so it works. So anyway, I think I need to play around with this thing a lot more and maybe try and find some tutorials to figure out.

You know exactly how all this online stuff works. I can actually see the power in this EXO site stuff. There is quite a bit in here which really excites me in terms of uh, you know, being able to configure alerts and events and uh and do stuff like that and I would obviously have to install the Uh tools, the um uh TI uh tools or the compilers and stuff. like to look at the Uh source code to how easy that is to modify and then create your own application.

Of course this is just an Internet of Things uh demo, but if you wanted your own uh application to uh, be internet connected enabled I'm sure it's a fair bit more work than this. so but um I do kind of see the value in uh in a lot of the power in a lot of all this, but I've had a lot of Issu quite a few issues with this thing and maybe it is a pebcak error with uh Stupid me, but hey, you know I'm trying to use this thing out of the box I followed the quick start guide and I'm getting uh, constant errors popping up and all sorts of things and just stuff like just simple switch events not working as I'd expect them to but the email alerts seem to work that you know the remote Tic Tac toe game worked and all that sort of jazz. So I yeah I don't know I probably going to call it quer tears. It's probably been long enough it to take me another hour couple of hours to install the Uh C compilers and everything else and look through the code and try and modify it and do all that sort of example.

but hey, you know it's worth having to play around yourself. I mean for for 20 bucks, it's only going to cost you 20 bucks and your time to have a play around with this thing. So I don't know it's it's not too bad, but yeah I think there's probably a few I Suspect there's a few bugs in here and the out-of thebox user experiences. It kind of worked.

but then quite a few issues. so I don't know? take that what you will. that's a um, look at. uh, trying to get this Internet of Things 20 Buck Internet of Things Launchpad working Hope you found it moderately useful.

It wasn't a tutorial by any, uh, stretch. it was just me using it straight out of the box and following the quick start start guide so you could probably expect a similar thing. Maybe you won't have the same hassles I will, but uh yeah does kind of work Anyway, Hope you enjoyed it. If you want to discuss it, jump on over to the Eev blog Forum Catch you next time.

Whoa. Hang on One last thing. um, you know how I mentioned the ADC at the start of this? Well, let's have a look at the data sheet. Brief look: look at this top left corner there page 1,861 of almost 9 a 1900 page data sheet for this chip.

Do you believe it? Anyway, it has a whole ADC section I'm sure you can get a short form version of the data sheet, but this is the full thing. 19900 Pages That's Fpga like data sheets. that's just Madness but such is the power andx F ability of these modern micros. They cover absolutely everything.

but oh, jez. Anyway, we got all the data we can possibly need for the ADC down here by the looks of it. And let's have a look down: look at the input: uh, leakage current there two microamps maximum analog Source Resistance: 500 ohms So there you go. that's quite High You want to drive this with a low impedance uh source to minimize your errors, that's for sure.

Um ADC Conversion Clock uh runs at 16 m GZ 1 Meg sample per second rate They claim two I thought as their top level uh, spec there so I'm not sure what's going on there, whether or not they're claiming the second uh Channel or not and uh, maybe could inter leave them. but uh yeah. Conversion: Time 1 microc sample time Resolution: 12 bits integral nonlinearity plusus 1.5 or three least significant Uh bits maximum differential nonlinearity You know it. It's an okay ADC for a 12 bitter so it's probably doing offset error.

There we go. there's your 15 least significant Uh bits offset error there gain error 30 least significant bits there you go. So n you know it starts to get a bit ordinary and there's your signal to noise ratio stuff and you can go out and compare this with like A5 or $10 ADC like 12bit ADC a real proper one that's designed for performance and linearity and you know no errors and everything else. So um I recommend you go get and look at all the traps for young players here.

look at all these little footnotes here. you got to look out. So you got to read all these two capacitors in parallel. Blah not valid here, blah blah blah with signal common.

Oh, there you go. got to be careful. You got to read all the fine print there. Nasty.

Oh here we go. Two Meg samples per second? There you go. so it looks like you can Actually they specified at one Meg sample and two Meg samples. so you're probably expect worst specs at 2 Meg sample.

There we go. 32 mahz clock there and uh yeah, okay and no similar similar specs I think so there you go anyway I Highly recommend you going and compare that to a real ADC in quot marks and uh, see the performance differences.