Fairchild changes sampling policy

After 39 years as a happy Fairchild customer, having even been a franchised distributor at one stage, I went to their website today after mentioning a new I2C buffer from them. I am not sure when I last needed samples from them but it wasn't recently so I haven't been abusing the system. That didn't matter, my application has been REJECTED and I find that Canada is now in Europe because I had to contact EUROPE sales office.

Sorry Fairchild, after 39 loyal years you just blew it. Sadly the company that fostered such talent as Bob Widlar, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Frederico Faggin seems to have some sort of problems with North American designers.

I2C alive and well!

For many years I2C - the "Inter Integrated circuit Communications" bus has been a staple part of my design diet. For many years Philips/NXP, Analog Devices and TI have provided a nice array of general purpose parts and many specialised devices came with I2C interface.

All went along nicely and quietly for years. But just recently things have changed! Everybody seems to be getting onto the bandwagon. First, the PC world was blessed with SMbus - based on I2C and then we are off. Now there are several new control/supervisory standards based on I2C, ( PMbus for power management, IPMB for chassis management) and with NXP introducing high speed extensions it has all come back into play!

SO how do we make it all work? For starters the old I2C with soft pull-ups just doesn't cut it anymore, the P82B715 and P82B96 from NXP are fine, but they are getting dated and are not as flexible as we might need. SO new things were needed, a search uncovered that Linear Technology had introduced some new parts that offer us some more. And just today I found out that Fairchild have entered the race with this device.

But nothing really satisfied hte needs I had until a colleague pointed out Hendon Semiconductor. Hendon, I thought? Now I know a couple of Hendons, and I was a little surprised when I found that this Hendon is the one in Australia. Then it dawned on me. For many years Philips had run a very successful hybrid plant at Hendon - and this has morphed into Hendon Semiconductor. And their specialty? I2C and bus buffers! In fact they have a range of about 10 parts either announced or upcoming which will provide a match for many applications. A visit to their specialist site at busbuffer.com is well worth a few minutes.

DISCLAIMER: I have no ties with Hendon other than being a very happy user. Their US office have been very helpful and if you look carefully you will see my LEDuino product uses the IES5501.

Arduino/Leduino mechanical drawing

The Arduino concept, and our own LEDuino, have been a great success. But one persistent difficulty I see is the lack of an accurate board outline drawing. At least supposedly "authorative" template I have seen had errors. So based on the Eagle files of the official Arduino Diecimila I created a layer in my EDA package that has the dimensions that as far as I can tell are accurate. This PDF file is a copy of that layer. Unfortunately I do not use Eagle but if you do, feel free to translate my drawing and I can happily post it on my site if you want.

LEDuino in the wild.

Well, the first LEDuinos are making their way into the wild. The very first shipment went to Australia. I hope the unit enjoys going back to my home country! Response so far has been very gratifying. We are working on some application examples using the LEDuino specific capabilities, more news soon.

Arduino field to get a new entry

For some time now my colleagues and I have been using Arduino ( http://arduino.cc ) style hardware based on the Atmel ATmega168 processor and a very easy to use development environment. The Arduino IDE environment is flexible enough for much rapid prototyping work, but simple enough for non-technical people to use, in fact it was originally designed for teaching design students how to build interactive projects.

The more we used the system, the more we liked it. But the more we used it the more we found we were missing some things we take for granted on our more sophisticated development platforms.So why not add some interfaces to the Arduino to make it more usable in a variety of applications?

So we sat down and figured out what we use most commonly. Thus is born the LEDuino.

• Buffered I2C bus for longer cable runs and higher bus current operation. So we added an IES5501 bidirectional driver.


• We play a lot with designs for model railway layouts. Already we use a lot of DCC, so we figured that a standard DCC decoder input, complete with basic acknowledge facility. So we added that with full galvanic isolation both ways for convenience.


• In a number of situations we use CAN Bus. Several developing or proposed model railway layout control busses use CAN, so we figured we could be compatible and give ourselves a simple development platform for that too. CAN is also used in a variety of other fields where we have some professional involvement.

So why the name LEDuino?

Well, one of our engineers develops a lot of LED based technology for architectural, visual effects and signage, he often wants to talk to serial interface devices like the TLC5940 from TI. So we added an entirely custom connector on the bottom edge of the photo, it has a serial interface that is designed to mate with some of our other products. As time goes on some of these products will be added to this range of products.

So this is it, the beginnings of a new range of Arduino inspired technology which is in fact already well proven, well used, and well liked.