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Page Modified on: 05/07/04 |
       
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Knight Rider Display Project This project started out as a VU meter. I reused parts and pieces to improve the VU meter and give it additional functionality. It is amazing how much time it takes to create a small thing like this. Knight Rider was a movie in the early 80’s. The main story is about a police officer who is deadly wounded and considered to be dead. He is found by a Samaritan doctor and nursed back to health. Under his new identity he is given a fully autonomous robot built inside a Pontiac Trans-Am named KITT. There was a small ambient display on the hood of the car that displayed the current condition of the car. Example: during normal travel it would only scan back and fourth, but when KITT “spoke” it turned into a VU meter to display the intensity of the voice. Building the LED display from scratch I used 2 x 16 (32) individual LED’s. The PIC chip has pins that can be used as inputs or outputs. There is a built in function that will set up each pin as an input or an output. Register A has 6 inputs/outputs, register B has 8 inputs/outputs, register C has 6 inputs/outputs. I used four (4) pins from register B. Normally pin B0 is reserved for bus communication, but my code does not need to communicate with any other devices through the bus, so I used port B0. Using pin B0 made my code easier to write. First I built a small 8 LED display using only the 8 pins of the B register. That was fairly straight-forward. Starting from position 0 and will count up to 7 and turn only the pin on that currently corresponds to the counter’s value. All the rest will be turned off. The following is the code that I wrote:
Pictures of the 8 LED’s and the Knight Rider KITT car:
I realized that using only 8 LED’s will not look realistic it was way to small and the Knight Rider effect fell short of my expectations. So I doubled the number of LED’s but I quickly realized that I need to double the number of the outputs to achieve a realistic chaser effect. There are almost enough output pins on the PIC, but using all of them would have been a painful and uninteresting code to write. There are ways to create outputs from a limited amount of inputs. In this case there is always one LED on at any given time so the natural choice was using decoders. Decoders are … that take n number of inputs and return 2n number of outputs. I used HC138 decoders. There are 3 inputs and 8 outputs on each. There are 3 control/enable inputs two have Positive logic and on Negative logic. I wired the two Positive logic pins to +5 volts so the decoder would be only controlled by the Negative logic pin. With this method I could have created a maximum of 2^17 outputs versus the very limited 17 provided by the PIC chip. Bad code for the PIC
I started programming when I was 12 and my computer was a 086 Zenith laptop with less than a megabyte of memory. Programming the PIC chip brought back memories from the days I had to be careful using the stack space. I wrote a small code that used recursion. A very interesting thing happened: the program would run 3 times then indicator LED would flash, the PIC would crash and the code on it was corrupted. After downloading the code on it again the same thing happened. So naturally I rebooted the chip and tried again. I get the same result. I reload the assembler on the PIC and download my code on it. No change in the result: still I get 3 correct runs and then the code crashes. I looked up in the manual an the stack space of the PIC is very small and my code being recursive pushes values and addresses on the stack but never takes it off and the stack overflows – overwriting my code. I remembered that in Assembly class we learned that recursion is really inefficient and iteration is always better and faster, while recursion is quicker to write and easier to understand by others. I rewrote my code to use iteration instead of recursion.
This works as follows: There are 4 bits that can be on or off:
Pictures of weak LED's:
Pictures of the bright LED's:
If bit 0 is false the first decoder is enabled, because I used the negative logic enable pin. The second decoder is connected through an inverter to bit 0, so when B0 becomes true that will do two things it will disable the first decoder and it the output of the inverter will be 0 – which is the enable signal needed for the second decoder. I wired the bits 1-3 to the data inputs of the decoders. There are 8 outputs on each decoder. Each output corresponds to a decimal value from 0-7. The three inputs on the decoder correspond to converted decimal value that ranges from 0-7. There is only one output on at any given time. The program has an internal counter that will add a value that is either +1 or -1 depending if it is counting up or down. This method replaces the recursion which calls a function fur counting up or counting down. Conclusion: During the Umass Lowell BotFest I watched people looking at the Knight Rider and they were trying to figure out what it is doing. There was another group of people who did not know enough about circuits and chips to understand the design complexity and time that went into creating a small ambient display like the Knight Rider. Overall I learned a lot designing and building the VU light and the Knight Rider. There were theories that I had to read up on, and concepts that I knew about but I never used it like the stack management. Also soldering 32 LED’s taught me a few things (I only burned out 2 LEDs), but the experience gained by actually building the entire display is something that all computer science students should have as part of their training because just learning about theories is not enough to understand important design issues.
Videos of the project please right click and select <Save as>
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