Since our first Revolution Pi newsletter, we received many interesting feedback comments and constructive proposals from you to improve Revolution Pi. It’s time to inform you that some of your proposals so far will be realized in our final development steps.
The RevPi DIO modules will be delivered with additional functionalities. We will add PWM (puls width modulation) and counter inputs. You will find detailed information in this newsletter.
It’s your appreciated feedback which has encouraged us to believe in our community concept: You being an integral part of development and improvement of Revolution Pi is the best way to create an awesome product.
So we are looking forward to hear about your wishes and ideas and we hope to integrate many more of them in future development of Revolution Pi.
All of you who want to know more about the new features, just go on reading…
PWM
You can separately activate PWM functionality for each of the 14 outputs. That means, that instead of transferring just 1 bit per channel, a complete byte value containing the puls-width from 0 to 100 (percentage value) is transferred. Although our output driver ICs are able to handle high frequency PWM we are limited to low frequencies because PWM is realized by our RevPi DIO using software switching. One of the following PWM-frequencies can be chosen by configuration (find corresponding resolution of smallest percentage steps in brackets):
40 Hz (1%), 80 Hz (2%), 160 Hz (4%), 200 Hz(5%) und 400 Hz (10%)
Counter
You can separately activate a counter functionality for each of the 14 input channels. This results in a 32 bit count value per counter which is accessible in the central process image. Our configuration software PiCtory offers the following configuration values per counter:
- Type of pulse edge (pos./neg.) for counter increment
- Counter maximum value
- Wrap around or stop on maximum reached
- Alarm on any output when reaching an alarm value
- Reset by specific output values of RevPi Core
- Reset by any input defined for it
- Gated counting (counter is incremented only if gate input is set)
- Rotary encoder counter function for a pair of inputs (phase offset technique)