Make: Online : Liberlab - Open source lab

Liberlab - Open source lab

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MAKE Flickr photo pool member Francois Schnell posted up a ton of example/screenshots from "Liberlab" an open source lab project - "The Open Source project Liberlab aims to help democratize educational scientific experimentation through the creation and use of a DIY digital lab at a very low price ($20). Liberlab can also be used to learn about robotics, automation, human-machine interface or interactive arts." Project page and Flickr photo set.

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Posted by: antoker on May 31, 2006 at 1:19 PM

looks like the whole point with this project is to be able to measure and control via a pc. can't understand the point with PIC, a couple of DACs/ADCs should be sufficient to both measure and controll, while the rest of the functions could have been implemented by simply programming the pc.

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Posted by: pen_sq on May 31, 2006 at 2:45 PM

Here's another version with USB support: http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~marshall/projects/avr-hid/.
It scopes 6 analog channels, and sends them to the PC through a standard joystick driver.

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Posted by: Schneo on June 1, 2006 at 1:44 AM

"can't understand the point with PIC, a couple of DACs/ADCs should be sufficient to both measure and control"

the point/goal is simplicity/evolutivity/price:
The less components, the quicker/easiest it is to make. For ~ 3$ an Atmel AVR atmega8 give you plenty of IO, 6 ADC, internal oscillators, UART, etc. AVR are also quick enough for ADC(one instruction per cycle while Microchip PICs need 4 cycles)and obviously the firmware can always evolve to fit new needs.
Concerning Liberlab it also work well with a "USB to Serial cable".

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