What exactly is PowerMate going to be?

I’m quite curious to hear more about PowerMate. It sounds like a very usefull tool if I inderstand the short desciption on the outrageouscircuits website correctly. Wish someone will tell is more about it and when it will become available.

We are waiting in one resistor and then we can assemble and put in stock. Probably Monday.

It is the best volt and current meter you well ever have!

3 Likes

GHIFluke :wink:

What will the range be?

@ Gus - Did you prototype it with Gadgeteer? I know I built a few of these using Gadgeteer.

I like it already… And at that price especially.

Since there’s still not really much known about this yet… Why would I buy a PowerMate instead of this?

plus that it has promise of hackability

Ok. I’m willing to pay a little extra for open source :slight_smile: What would really be cool would be a serial output for logging data coming out of it. Can that be done via the programming plug? Perhaps add some RX/TX pins to the next model and have it constantly stream the values?

How much longer till this is available? I’m holding off on ordering my RETRO until I can ship this at the same time.

I think that there are no pins left after all the buttons, LEDs and display.

This one has serial output (no display):

I wonder if there’s a way for the programmer pins to serve double duty. I haven’t explored the chip.

this snippet may help… i stripped it down from some very early test program, it uses the programming port. I was using TeraTerm on the pc side. As-is, it may not compile

#include "mbed.h"
 #include "USBSerial.h"

int main(void) {
    uint8_t buf[128];
  
    USBSerial serial((uint16_t)0x1B9F  , (uint16_t)0x0104, (uint16_t)0x0001, false); // ghi bootloader VID/DIV           
    while(1)
    {
        serial.printf("Press X to for line echoing\r\n");       
        buf[0] = serial._getc();		
		// Command Processing
        if ('X' == buf[0]) {
           
            serial.printf("saw X\r");
            
        }
         while(0xd != (buf[0] = serial._getc()) ) {
                serial.putc(buf[0]);
                wait(0.01);
         }
         serial.putc(buf[0]);
         serial.putc(0xa);
         wait(.50);       
    }
}

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@ Jeff - Yes, that is USBSerila which we already have on OC mBed devices. We were talking about UART pins. Are these exposed?

USBSerial may be fine. I’m just wondering if there’s any way to do automated logging over time. If its to a PC, then that would be acceptable. However, having UART access does open up some other options.

Description updated

Picture up at PowerMate - | Mbed

Tried to ask a couple of Qs on the mbed forum but was denied (not published yet). Anyhoo…

What kind of accuracy and precision can we expect from this? How much power does it draw from USB? Is it’s own power draw factored into the displayed data?

The mbed forum denied your questions because the PowerMate wasn’t published yet?

Went back to mbed and can’t even find what I clicked… disregard. I did find some specs on the OC site.