Matrix user forums

We've spent a lot of time recently on expanding our range of E-Blocks and have quite a few new ones coming out soon - please keep an eye on our website for more details. Here's a taster of what's on the horizon...

* Bluetooth
* Voice CODEC (add voice comms to the Bluetooth board)
* MIDI
* LIN
* Motor driver
* PS2 / VGA
* SD card reader
* GPS
* MP3 decoder
* Relay
* Opto-isolator
* USB
* CODEC (for dsPIC)
* Colour graphic LCD display

These will all work with the following "upstream" E-blocks boards (some of which are also about to be released):

* PICmicro multiprogrammer
* PICmicro development board
* CPLD
* FPGA
* Atmel AVR
* ARM
* dsPIC

If you have any suggestions for new E-Blocks or would like to see other micros supported, please get in touch.

" Colour graphic LCD display "

Any news on this one yet? I haven't seen much about it on the site yet.

Cheers

We now have it in stock and it looks great... We'll launch it properly sometime this month.

It uses a 128x128 full-colour display, similar to that used on Nokia phones such as the 6200.

Hey Steve,

Ah interesting, I've seen various videos of them in action over the internet and an eblock for them would be pretty cool.

Cheers,
Eddie

Steve,

A great selection of boards.

My interest is mainly in using a board to prove a concept, so the clearer the documentation can be made the better, as the ideal will simply be to transpose an E-board circuit and component(s) to a prototype board for further development.

On this score an I2C board with a simple (industry standard?) memory would be as useful as the SPI board, which has a FRAM memory chip that is not readily available (also not available in DIL format (?) which excludes some users) and the D/A which is a seperate unconnected function (and presumably adds cost).

A boxed programmer board with flying leads would be useful to take projects seemlessly from 488 board to prototype board.

The latter could simply be a boxed-up Lite programmer board. Talking of which I would like to see that back on the list as it provides a realistic (size/cost) option to make and use a project made from e-boards.

A board which I would like to try out (and should be popular for educational users as well) would be a speech synthesis board. The SP0256 phenome based chip seems still in vogue and a board would make a great Flowcode component.

However, one issue that comes up time and time again from people experimenting with PIC's is interfacing with a PC (there are any number of posts asking about this on the web). There is clearly a niche for a course on how to use Visual Basic (which is now free) to inteface (RS232/Bluetooth/USB etc) perhaps including pre-packaged sub-programmes to make the job easier. This should also be useful in the education field.

Since I am in full flow, I think there is scope to market a Flowcode for children. My 4 year old successfully (verbally, me typing))programmed the Buggy component and later decided we needed a program to alert nurses when a hospital ward was too hot, such as when they were asleep at night (yes, it is called a thermostat but at 4 you don't know that (or about night shifts!)). However, there is a lack of jolly graphics to keep attention.

Well thats me done, better go do some work...

Hope the boards sell.

Mark

Thanks for the comments, Mark. Here are a couple of points I'd like to add...

Mark wrote: However, one issue that comes up time and time again from people experimenting with PIC's is interfacing with a PC (there are any number of posts asking about this on the web). There is clearly a niche for a course on how to use Visual Basic (which is now free) to inteface (RS232/Bluetooth/USB etc) perhaps including pre-packaged sub-programmes to make the job easier. This should also be useful in the education field.

See the "Using Visual Basic with E-blocks" article on this page:
http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/Learnin ... /index.php

Mark wrote: Since I am in full flow, I think there is scope to market a Flowcode for children. My 4 year old successfully (verbally, me typing))programmed the Buggy component and later decided we needed a program to alert nurses when a hospital ward was too hot, such as when they were asleep at night (yes, it is called a thermostat but at 4 you don't know that (or about night shifts!)). However, there is a lack of jolly graphics to keep attention.

Our CoCo product is more appropriate for Primary education. See here:
http://www.matrixmultimedia.com/coco/index.htm

And there is a downloadable demo of the new version from here:
http://www.commotiongroup.co.uk/coco.html

We do sell Flowcode into schools in other countries, but sadly not much into Britain (but we do very well at post-16). I'll not say any more on this subject because I will start to rant about the state of education...