Directory contents for derg_dev:
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The D.Er.G. Dev Board
This folder is dedicated to documenting the D.Er.G. (Dragon's EtheRnet Glow) development board/kit.
The D.Er.G. system will be a CERN-OHL-Licensed set of systems to provide high quality LED driving and sensor data networking, all through an Ethernet system comprised of T1S shared medium lines and a 100Base-TX backbone network.
This development kit will be the first step to researching and creating these devices, featuring an easy to use USB-C PD interface for power, FTDI for UART+Ethernet, and built-in SPE ethernet hardware, attached to a prototype of the D.Er.G. submodule board.
It will be a complete solution for testing and demonstrating the planned capabilities of the D.Er.G. system.
Changelog:
- 2024/09/30: Initial publish and detailing of hardware choices
Planned features:
The following features are planned to be added to the system, either to aid development effort or to try out actual hardware features.
D.Er.G. features
- Pi Pico RP2040 core controller
- Power regulation stage
- Input Hard- and Soft-fuses
- Variable output voltage DC/DC buck, 3.5V to 5V range.
Variable voltage was chosen to reduce idle power draw of unused NeoPixel LEDs. A sense line at the furthest strip point is used to adjust voltage. - 3.3V LDO for core components
- Power gating for LEDs
- Power monitoring:
- Input voltage/current
- V3.3, VLED (at regulator, at far-point), ILED
- T1S MAC-PHY LAN8651. Allows connection to a T1S-based Single-Pair-Ethernet, which allows up to 10MBit/s data transfer rates. The other side can connect via SPI to the host MCU, making it suitable to be added to the RP2040.
- Sensor suite
- Gesture+Colour sensor (APDS-9960)
- Temp/Humidity sensor (undecided)
- 6, maybe 9DOF IMU for motion tracking (BMI270 or ICM20948, see SlimeVR)
- Maybe capacitive touch sensor (IQS323001DNR, slider option on armor :>)
- Maybe small ALPHANUM digit, to signal status codes and also just look good
- Audio Suite
- Definitely I2S DAC+Amp for speaker driving (TFA9879HN)
- Maybe I2S microphone if desired (SPH0645LM4H)
- LED driving
- Including a ring of LEDs directly on the board for shiny purposes - pretty! :D
- Variable purpose outputs routed to the PIO pads.
Developmental features
The dev side of the kit will be laid out as break-away-capable side of the PCB, so it can be removed from the D.Er.G. side and used for other things later on.
- FTDI for UART/JTAG
- Using new FTDI with USB-C PD to provide power to the suit systems on the go. The new FTDI is pretty cool for having that!
- USB+ETH combo IC to split computer USB to FTDI and RP2040 and provide Ethernet, all via one cable
- T1S PHY connected to a 10/100MBit IC switch, to
translate data to/from regular 100Base-TX
- Ethernet switch has a free RMII port that could be used for e.g. an ESP32 with RMII, which is the plan for the ethernet distribution boards :>