microTone Module - Simple Analog Hardware Interface

microTone Module is analog interface to connect microcontrollers or digital logic systems with PCs. This interface use PC sound card’s audio output terminal to send commands to external hardware systems.

microTone Module is an open source project and all its software source codes and hardware designs are available to download at sourceforge.net/p/microtone. All the compiled software and source codes of this project are distributed under the terms of GNU Lesser General Public License. Hardware design and other documents are distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Software library of microTone Module is a Win32 DLL and it can use with any programming language which allows interface with dynamic link libraries (e.g: C++, C#, Python, Java, Delphi, Visual Basic, etc.) Some wrappers for this DLL are already implemented and available to download at microTone Module sourceforge.net code repository. And also if you implement or improve microTone Module wrappers please share them with the community.

Documentation and other related information about microTone Module are available at microTone Module wiki at sourceforge.net.

microTone Module processing hardware unit is consist with well known CM8870 DTMF decoder and PIC16F628A microcontroller. Technically processing section of microTone Module can be implementing using most of the microcontrollers in the market and if you do so please share your designs, comments and firmware with the community.

Comments

Ben said…

Regarding using the audio jack for for communication.. any idea how those ir blasters work?

They have a 3.5mm jack on one side (the side you hook up to a pc/smartphone), and then on the other side there is a small plastic enclosure for the ir.

But to generate the 38khz freq for a typical remote control using an audio jack, the only approach I've seen is to have 2 leds back to back. Those commercial emitters seem awfully small to have 2 ir leds, so how do they do it?!

December 1, 2013 at 7:39 AM

Dilshan Jayakody said…

Hi Ben, most of the IR blasters use 2 IR emitter approach and you can make it smaller using SMD versions of IR emitters.

December 1, 2013 at 7:36 PM

CD2003 - yet another simple FM radio receiver

In the last few days, we are looking for some simple FM radio receiver to integrate into one of our ongoing projects. For that, we try several FM radio receiver ICs including TDA7000, CD2003/TA2003/TA8164, CXA1019, and KA22429. Out of all those chips we select CD2003 (or TA2003/TA8164) based receiver for our project because of its simplicity and outstanding performance. Except to CD2003, Sony CXA1019 also perform well but we drop it because of its higher component count. We design our receiver based on Toshiba TA2003 datasheet and later we try TA8164 and CD2003 with the same circuit. Either CD2003 or TA8164 can directly replace TA2003 IC, and as per our observations, TA8164 gives excellent results out of those 3 chips. A prototype version of CD2003 FM radio receiver The PCB design and schematic which we used in our prototype project are available to download at google drive (including pin-outs of crystal filters and inductors ). Except for CD2003 IC, this receiver consist

Arduino superheterodyne receiver

In this project, we extend the shortwave superheterodyne receiver we developed a few years ago . Like the previous design, this receiver operates on the traditional superheterodyne principle. In this upgrade, we enhanced the local oscillator with Si5351 clock generator module and Arduino control circuit. Compared to the old design, this new receiver uses an improved version of an intermediate frequency amplifier with 3 I.F transformers. In this new design, we divide this receiver into several blocks, which include, mixer with a detector, a local oscillator, and an I.F amplifier. The I.F amplifier builds into one PCB. The filter stage, mixer, and detector stages place in another PCB. Prototype version of 455kHz I.F amplifier. In this prototype build, the Si5351 clock generator drives using an Arduino Uno board. With the given sketch, the user can tune and switch the shortwave meter bands using a rotary encoder. The supplied sketch support clock generation from 5205kHz (tuner frequ

Calculator for audio output transformers

Audio output transformers are heavily used in a vacuum tube and some (older) transistor base audio power amplifiers, but these days output transformer are quite hard to find and expensive item. For homebrew projects, the best option is to construct those transformers by ourselves and this script helps to calculate winding parameters for those transformers. This " AF output transformer calculator " script is written using Python and it works with most of the commonly available Python interpreters . The script is available to download at google drive under the terms of GNU General Public License version 3.0 . Homebrewed 25k: 4 output transformer Once supplied the input parameters this script provides a winding ratio, the number of turns required for primary and secondary winding and required copper wire gauges for both primary and secondary windings, etc. We construct several AF output transformers based on results of this script, which including transformers for M