Glomerida Microcontroller Board

Glomerida Board is a low-cost microcontroller we have designed for robotics, machine vision, sensor networks and real-time control experiments. It exploits the significant flexibility of the Cypress Programmable System-on-Chip and its design tools. We use the board in various projects. I have to say, this is an amazing chip, contains a 32-bit ARM processor as well as a large set of fully software configurable analog and digital hardware blocks such as analog-to-digital, digital-to-analog converters, timers, logic units or opamps, and lots of pins that can be configured for digital or analog signal processing.

The board can be directly inserted onto breadboards. It has 16 3.3 V and 12 5 V fully programmable general-purpose I/O pins to interface with the physical world (so it can support designs requiring quite a large number of sensors). It can control two motors forwards and backwards independently. We also have included connections for a camera and an LCD panel. It can be powered via its USB connection (which is also used for programming) or from a DC power source.

Further details about the Glomerida Board and relevant data sheets can be found here.

Using the Glomerida Board

PSoC Creator is the Integrated Development Environment for programming and configuring the Glomerida Board. It has been installed on all Windows machines available in the department. It is freely downloadable, you can install on your computers as well, if you would like to use your own setup for programming and using the Glomerida Board.

I think the best procedure for learning how to use the Glomerida Board is as follows:

1. Read Chapter 1 of the book My First Five PSoC 3 Designs (PSoC 3 and PSoC 5 are essentially same except that PSoC 5 has a 32-bit ARM processor whilst PSoC 3 has an 8-bit one)
2. Go through my video tutorials and repeat the activities with your own Glomerida board:
   • Introducing the board and soldering the header pins and sockets
   • Create your first PSoC project (you will need these bootloader files: bootloader.hex and bootloader.elf)
   • Using CapSense buttons (You will need this glomerida_components.cycomp file for using the CapSense buttons, LCD display unit and camera module)
   • Using LCD display
   • Serial I/O over the USB connection (you will need to copy these serial I/O C code fragments into the main.c)
   • Using the camera module (start with this sample project, then you can use this Matlab script to view the camera output). The Camera.h file, which is included in the sample project, provides a summary of the image processing functions.
   • Using interrupts (this video is from 2014, and uses an older version of the Glomerida Board but interrupt processing is not different in the new board)
3. Then, do the following exercises of My First Five PSoC 3 Designs:
   • Chapter 3: Blink an LED
   • Chapter 4: UART
   • Chapter 6: Digital Logic
   • Chapter 7: Precision Analog
4. The following Cypress video tutorials are useful:
   • Creating a new project
   • Using starter designs
   • Exploring the component catalog
   • Opening example projects