PEBBLE - Picaxe Electronic Bread Board Layout Emulator

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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE V2 - breadboard updates

Over the weekend, following some feedback from Andrew (of KiwiPatch fame), I have altered the Kiwi-Patch board for the latest colour rendition. Apparently my first colour redition was more in line with the earlier versions.

Also following email comms with manuka I have modified the Learners breadboard to include a permanently depicted battery at the right side of the screen and a small off-board parking area also to the right with “holes” indicated for ease of component placement
 

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BCJKiwi

Senior Member
It appears there is still an issue when trying to route multiple wires from the top of one chip the bottom of another.

This was raised previously in relation to the offset wires.
Unless vertical offset wires, and wires without bare end(s) are availble a proper 'Z' wire is not possible.

I really do appreciate that this is a lot of programming work but feel that without this feature, wiring anything but the simplest of circuits will be problematic.

Westy, is there any chance of this feature being implemented?

Have reworked the circuit from post #108 and have some additional wiring in now utilising offset wires but there are still 4 more wires to cross from top left to bottom extreme right. As can be seen, the blue 'Z' wires don't really work the way a jumper wire does and without vertical offset wires a lot of columns get consumed.

Also, a minor point of semantics (touched on a little while ago in a different post) the wire length is described in spans. Kept having to adjust the length of the wires as the number actually represents the hole count including first and last. Spans is actually the count of the number of pitches or spaces. Perhaps a rewording to holes rather than spans might clarify.
 

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moxhamj

New Member
Hmm - led displays do gobble up 4 holes inside the display. So not many to work with if you only have two above and below the display. On a real board I'd put in a diagonal wire. But my real boards look really messy (which is why I don't post many pictures of them!). Z wires look neater. Or do you use lots of bridging wires? Or would you consider that in the real world, if you were transferring this over to vero board, you would have more than 5 holes above and below the midline?

Another feature of my "real world" setup is two breadboards, one above the other. And many times I've needed both, as there is a real limitation to what you can do with just one board. Would it work with two boards and the display on one and the picaxe on the other? Would this fit on the screen?
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - increasing wire segment arrrangement options

“Spans” relative to the wire lengths is a left over from the original Ray Wilson (Analogue VBB) version.
Concur that a span is normally (like in reference to a bridge over a river) the number of “gaps”/spaces covered as opposed to the number of holes, so I can change that quickly.

I did think about vertical offsets previously but with many other requests did put that on one side for now. If my interpretation is correct, then as I see it, if we have wires in a second version with insulated ends and allow for offsets to vertical wires then we need a lot of selectors available for each wire segment to fully define it (since the java scripting does not know where the previous/next wire will be).
So in terms of selectors for a single wire segment as I see it in a first pass, we end up with:
1. orientation = (a) horizontal or (b) vertical
2. offset = (a) straight and above/left of, (b) straight and below/right, (c) horiz above, or (d) horiz below
3. top/left wire end (a) straight and bare, (b)straight and insulated, or (c) curved and bare
4. bottom/right wire end (a) straight and bare, (b)straight and insulated, or (c) curved and bare
5. top/left wire end (a) stop on hole, (b) stop above/to left of hole, (c) stop below/right of hole
6. bottom/right wire end (a) stop on hole, (b) stop above/to left of hole, (c) stop below/right of hole

That’s quite a lot of permutations for the beginner and maybe many others to think about (and me to program!) though the default would be straight and bare lining up on the holes. The selection list may start to approach the full height of the screen by the time we have some (a) headings, (b) visual icons wire and (c) radio buttons, along with the existing colour selector and other buttons (Okay, Copy, Delete) are included.
 
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BCJKiwi

Senior Member
Yep, as indicated I know it would be a lot of work, hence the Q "realistically will it ever happen" - I guess the answer is no.

Just using the 7Segs as an example. Many circuits will need wires between upper and lower sides of the board.

This is just part of a real circuit that has a 28x1, SAA1064, 4x 7Segs a couple LEDS and PB plus off board PSU and Sensors - what is in essence a simple circuit for the real world but too complicated for PEBBLE I fear.

It is constructed on two bits of vero board,
first has 28X1 and SAA1064, 2 LEDS and the PB,
second has the 4x 7Segs.
One board is mounted on top of the other.

Think the first board might be PEBBLED but not as a true representation of the final layout.

Oh well, back to Diptrace for this one.
 
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alband

Senior Member
There are a few things I've spotted.

It doesn't work at all in Chrome (loads half then stops), but all who have Chrome must have downloaded it using another browser so that should matter.

In IE8, generally everything works. The only things I found are that when the PICAXE08 is selected, it gets deleted, and that the pink background in some of the batteries still shows. Those are the only problems I found that haven't allready been address.

Really nice piece of software though and should make that daunting question, "can you please draw a picture of your circuit?" a little less daunting.

Also, it seems to me that since so many people will always want to add their own components, would it be practical to make some component "blanks" that just need to have a .gif image added and a name?

Keep up the hard work! :)
 
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slurp

Senior Member
alband said:
It doesn't work at all in Chrome (loads half then stops)
Click to expand...
Not a problem I've experiance (when using chrome at home), it's slow when using online from down under but appears ok when operating from an unzipped file or a "local" host.

We're still with IE6 at work, there's no point trying to load something from the other side of the world as the images take "forever" but a local (off line)copy poses no problem at all. It's worth following the post 97 in this thread and getting a copy to use off line.

regards,
Colin
 
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manuka

Senior Member
AFAIK my trial hosting site at => www.picaxe.orconhosting.net.nz/pebble2 now includes all WestAust55's tweak & bug responses - pink battery background, missing plain 08 image etc.

Thought- initially zigzag wire needs can of course be simply attended to with a graphic editor (samples below ). Most have a so called "Magic Wand" selection tool which selects an area with the same colour(s). Simply touching over the area you want selects all surrounding pixels of the same colours (a breeze for uniform wires!), for lifting & transparently moving to suit.

Of course eventually defining a left & right "Z", with selectable heights & horiz. arm lengths may fit the bill ? Yes- it'd take some head scratching (& we shouldn't lose sight of this being essentially a FREE layout tool)... Stan
 

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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - improved wire config selection

Home from a day-long seminar a little earlier than anticipated this evening ( and yahoo also find I have forum access again!).

Did some thinking :eek: on the train on the way to and from seminar and have "whipped up" a new wire selection/editing menu which is about as big as can be used on a screen and should cover most of the options/permutations.

No code working behind this yet but may not be as difficult as anticipated (but that is yet to be proven :) )

Will start on some code tomorrow night . . . . .
 

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BCJKiwi

Senior Member
That would be fantastic - wish you well with hte coding challenge!

Just one thought on the terminology:- would "The Ins. end aligns" be better if it were the same as previous lines - i.e. "Insulated end aligns" - only one more character.
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - Improving wire configuration options

Did some work on improving the wire configuration options tonight.

Did the coding to accept, save and extract the 6 variables into just 3 existing record fields (1 used and 2 spare) for each wire so that I do not have to add extra fields all component data records. Plus small script changes to pass the extra config data to the wire drawing function.

Time spent tonight thinking about the maths side of the extra coding required to draw wires to all the additional permutations and will get into the wire drawing coding tomorrow evening. Will still take some evenings to get it all sorted.

Not much to show as screen shots at this stage . . . . .
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE V 2 - wire options/permutations advancing

Spent some time over my lunch break today and based upon my thinking/concepts of last night, put together some code to cover all of the permutations for horizontal wires. Some examples are as per the attached.
Tonight I work on the vertical wire combinations.
Still to apply some adjustments so that the wires line up with the exact required locations (fine tuning can take as long as writing the code) but it is well underway.
 

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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE V2 - Wire enhancements

This evening sees vertical wiring options implimented equal to the horizontal wire options.

Now the second half of the work . . . . to fine tune wire lengths and offsets so that ends for wire "joints" merge properly.
 

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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - addition of 40 pin chips

Now that I have provision for bread boards up to 50 rows in length, the 40 pin chips become a possibility. Even I use a 40X1 for many of my experiments and projects.

Not done in the past as 40 pin chips on a 23 row BB or even a 38 row BB would leave no/minimal space for other circuitry. Will be added to the wish list for future inclusion – the next revision is working towards adding enhanced wire placement as sought by some.

In the meantime you could always create you own image and on a temporary basis just give it the file name of a DIP chip you do not wish to use. If you do that, then you could post the .gif image for inclusion into PEBBLE. Your image processing program needs to be able to set a colour from the pallet as a transparent colour – Paintshop Pro can do that (but not MSPaint).
 
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PerthEng

Member
Westy,

WOW! Amazing!

When one looks at the number of responses (211) and views (6711) so far one would think this thread has been going a long time. But even considering the good Dr_A's initial thread only started on 26th May, and that the Pebble thread only started on 5th June, the advances with this layout presentation program is great.

The number of views and input on a thread which is not even in relation to a question is a sign of the interest and need for such program.

thanks for all the effort.
 
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manuka

Senior Member
Yes- impressive, but I'm sure a good 3000 of these views arise from Dippy, who may be convinced PEBBLE is just an elaborate colonial tease.
 
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Dippy

Moderator
Aw Stan... cheeky monkey. I love the way you said "may be" ....

Actually (seriously) I think its a valuable educational aid for students.
A lot of work has been done by Westy and that other bloke, so keep bumping it.

I bet Stan has got a T-shirt printout already .... sounds dangerous - you'll have spotty students poking resistors into painful places :)

Tell you what would be handy - a combo of 2 or 3 components in a single image which is a download circuit - the amount of times this is done incorrectly is huge.
 
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AlainB

New Member
westaust55 said:
In the meantime you could always create you own image and on a temporary basis just give it the file name of a DIP chip you do not wish to use. If you do that, then you could post the .gif image for inclusion into PEBBLE. Your image processing program needs to be able to set a colour from the pallet as a transparent colour – Paintshop Pro can do that (but not MSPaint).
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Hi,

Here is one that I made, a small relay. I used Terminal_692.gif as template. It is a big template and it could be used for many differents components drawing. But, as it is, the "Label" function cannot really be used.

Alain
 

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moxhamj

New Member
Re Dippy: "Tell you what would be handy - a combo of 2 or 3 components in a single image which is a download circuit - the amount of times this is done incorrectly is huge."

Yes, that is a very good suggestion. What would it be - two resistors and maybe a stereo socket? Or just the wires? I'm noting some comments above about making GIFs transparent in places. Is it possible to have a picture that is mostly transparent and has the two resistors/stereo socket set up so that they fit onto pins 0 and 2? There would still be ways to connect it wrong, eg offset by 1, but mistakes would be less likely.
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - adding a relay

AlainB said:
Hi,

Here is one that I made, a small relay. I used Terminal_692.gif as template. It is a big template and it could be used for many differents components drawing. But, as it is, the "Label" function cannot really be used.

Alain
Click to expand...
Thanks Alain,

I will add that relay outline into the next revision under the "miscellaneous" group (re LDR menu icon). I might expand upon it by adding the coil and contact in schematic format for others to know how each of the terminals are used. Will also organise for the label to be in the middle of the image from the set-up details
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE - loading up a pre defined circuit

Dr_Acula said:
Re Dippy: "Tell you what would be handy - a combo of 2 or 3 components in a single image which is a download circuit - the amount of times this is done incorrectly is huge."

Yes, that is a very good suggestion. What would it be - two resistors and maybe a stereo socket? Or just the wires? I'm noting some comments above about making GIFs transparent in places. Is it possible to have a picture that is mostly transparent and has the two resistors/stereo socket set up so that they fit onto pins 0 and 2? There would still be ways to connect it wrong, eg offset by 1, but mistakes would be less likely.
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If a simple start-up circuit is sought as per the attached image,
then just have the student/learner/others load up the appropriate file using the SAVE/LOAD button (bottom of menu):

Code: 
IC||604|270|2||U?|||School08M|IC||School08M_2
Wire||692|103|21||11|#FF0000|2|11|||
Wire||692|461|21||11|#000000|2|11|||
Terminal||681|403|1||TS?||3|4|Gnd  . . SI . .  SO||terminal_431
Wire||667|377|11||11|#CC6633|3|11|||
Resistor|22000|669|237|1|Resistor|R?||1||IC||
Resistor|10000|716|272|2|Resistor|R?||2||IC||
BREADBOARDSTYLE=BB3
 

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manuka

Senior Member
My Orcon hosting space eagerly awaits Westy's zig-zag add on files, as does a pre-organised (but as yet unannounced) UK mirror. Guess it may well be time to call it PEBBLE 2.5 (or even 3?) & offer a zipped down load ?

PEBBLE has really been a superb labour of love by WestAust55. It's hard to credit how he has managed the time & concentration, given his rumoured day job of unearthing opals & taming Pilbara ore shipments. Us Kiwis are even pondering letting his Australian kin folk win the next Trans-Tasman rugby match in deference. You can't ask for higher praise than that for a footy loving nation like NZ. Mind you we'd draw the line at cricket concessions!
Stan.
 
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moxhamj

New Member
Those bendy wires are superb! My real breadboards never looked this good, and there is something about a neat looking breadboard that just makes you want to go and build it.

@manuka, that is a supreme sacrifice, but are you not saying this because you know we are going to win the rugby anyway *grin*?
 
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alband

Senior Member
Re post 224: I REALLY hope I haven't got this wrong, but surely, the attachment in p224 is wrong? 22k should go to the jack and 10k should pull it low? Currently, both go to the jack in series.

Aside from that, this is becoming extremely capable software. That wiring looks very impressive and I can't imagine how anyon would go about coding that. :eek:

Very nice work :D
 
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manuka

Senior Member
There is something about a neat looking breadboard that just makes you want to go and build it.
Click to expand...
It's fitting that you've mentioned this Dr_A, as such a mindset lies behind my enthusiasm for breadboards. Compared with lashing up a soldered version (on vero or PCB etc), I've long noted that BB layouts tend to encourage even the most hesitant assemblers.
 
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westaust55

Moderator
PEBBLE V2.1 is here

Well, what I thought this morning might have been a coding error proves to be more an "aberation" due to wire and hole length rounding which results in some vertical wires being a pixel short/long when matching to other wires and seems to be visible only in the top half of the BB when the bottom end of a wire stops above a line of a row of holes.

Lets see whether we can live with that . . . .


Will be away tomorrow so play and let me know what you think.
Will start on some other wish list items next week . . .

have fun . . .:)

EDIT: Although big, the PICAXE forum is supposed to allow txt files up to 1.91MB in size but will not load my files with size of 1.6MB :(

Looks like will have to wait for manuka to host
(copy going his way as well)
 
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westaust55

Moderator
alband said:
Re post 224: I REALLY hope I haven't got this wrong, but surely, the attachment in p224 is wrong? 22k should go to the jack and 10k should pull it low? Currently, both go to the jack in series.

Aside from that, this is becoming extremely capable software. That wiring looks very impressive and I can't imagine how anyon would go about coding that. :eek:

Very nice work :D
Click to expand...
Well spotted wrt program cct - done in a rush :eek:

If you look at post 209 on page 21
http://www.picaxeforum.co.uk/showthread.php?t=12629&page=21

I gave a copy of the wire definition pop-up window. Once you get the hang of how each line works it is easy to achieve the wire configurations.

The wire defaults mean that for the average user, you get a straight wire with bar ends without worrying about the other options.
 
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manuka

Senior Member
I'd trial hosted WestAust55's Ver 2.1 at my NZ Orcon site, but (given PEBBLE's zooming size) swampy on line response times were noted. The smaller PEBBLE2 (which is still there at => www.picaxe.orconhosting.net.nz/pebble2 ) itself was unacceptably tardy of course!

Although wary that all manner of hybrids may now develop, guess it's time to simply provide the complete Ver 2.1 PEBBLE package for local unzipping & installation. Check => www.picaxe.orconhosting.net.nz/pebblev2_1.zip


Stan
 
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westaust55

Moderator
Thanks Stan.

Funnily I just tried to access PEBBLE V2 that you are hosting as an on-line version and it downloaded almost instantly this evening (9:30pm WA time) :)

Will spend some time during this next week adding a few more bits from the recent wish list as a final variant (V2.2?).
 
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pilko

Senior Member
Westaust --- thanks for all the work you've done with PEBBLE.
I have a request (hope it's not a daft one) Is it possible to have a vertical resistor/diode.Sometimes space is at a premium and I just want to span a single space between two holes
thanks.
 
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slurp

Senior Member
really starting working on 2.1 and getting the hang of bent wires (I like these) but managed to crash out of one of the menu boxes... not sure what I've done but it cleared everything back to the starting point.

I thought I hit enter rather than ok but haven't managed to replicate the error as it appears that enter does nothing when I try now. :confused:

Using Chrome 2.0.172.33 at the moment.

best regards,
colin
 
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SilentScreamer

Senior Member
slurp said:
really starting working on 2.1 and getting the hang of bent wires (I like these) but managed to crash out of one of the menu boxes... not sure what I've done but it cleared everything back to the starting point.

I thought I hit enter rather than ok but haven't managed to replicate the error as it appears that enter does nothing when I try now. :confused:

Using Chrome 2.0.172.33 at the moment.

best regards,
colin
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Its a bug in chrome rather than PEBBLE I believe. I have the same problem and its probably not worth WA55 finding a work around as there are so few chrome users. The entire right click menu system doesn't work in Opera as a result of the browser not allowing JavaScript to modify it.
 
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slurp

Senior Member
SilentScreamer said:
Its a bug in chrome rather than PEBBLE I believe. I have the same problem and its probably not worth WA55 finding a work around as there are so few chrome users. The entire right click menu system doesn't work in Opera as a result of the browser not allowing JavaScript to modify it.
Click to expand...
Yup, just managed to reproduce the bug... but not in IE8 or Mozilla.

It occurs with the text box entry use for ICs and Notes. I'll be careful next time... or use another browser ;)

regards,
Colin
 
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