Ginger

1. 1. What is ginger
   

2. Ginger is yet another physical computing platform, which is similar to gainer (http://gainer.cc). The goal of project is to develop PC Platforms with AVR.
   

2. 2. The difference with ginger and gainer
   

3. Ginger uses AVR microprocessor from Atmel Corp. for the core component, while gainer use PSoC from CYPRESS. Ginger’s configuration modes and commands are almost compatible with gainer. The exceptions are described in the following subsections.
   

2.1 Implementations of USB bridge

1. Ginger makes use of avr-usb (http://www.obdev.at/avrusb/) for the implementation of USB interface. Thanks to avr-usb, no external USB-serial bridge chip is required to interface host PC, and this makes ginger hardware simple. ATmega88 is chosen because it is available in AKIZUKI-denshi, where many electric parts are sold in bargain price.(We love the store)
   

2. 
   

3. In Macintosh platforms, you don’t need to install software drivers, as the device is recognized as/dev/cu.usbmodem*. In Windows, please use ginger.inf provided with source code in tarball.
   

2.2 Difference of Electric

1. •Digital Input pin is pull-up instead of pull-down.
   

2. •No CONFIG-８ mode; this is because AVR dosen’t support electro-static sensors.
   

3. •Has at most 6 analog input ports. No pre-amp and the input voltage is between 0 and 5 volts.
   

4. •Has at most 6 analog output ports
   

5. •Because of A-IN and A-OUT spec, available ports in CONFIG-2,3,4 are different from gainer.
   

6. •Maximum current is 40mA/port. (both source and sink) Maximum current is 200mA in total.
   

7. •There will be more.. I need to find out.
   

3. 3. Compatibility of host software
   

4. •Most of library might be compatible with gainer.
   

5. •In beta version, though, only Processing library is checked by author.
   

6. •CONFIG-7 (matrix LED) is not implemented in V0.9
   

7. •CONFIG-8 will never be implemented.
   

8. •Ginger has an experimental mode named CONFIG-X, which has  8 D-IN and 8 D-OUT.
   

4. 4. Prototyping
   

5. A prototype device is build with universal PCB. A type-C board from AKIZUKI is just sufficient to populate all of parts.
   

6. If enough interest exist in community, I’ll order custom PCB.
   

5. 5.Conclusions and Related Works
   

6. With 8-Pin AVR, ATtiny45, very small device named ‘pepper’ is designed.  A 30 I/O pin device, which is called ‘sugar’ is under test.
   

7. Sugar use 40-Pin AVR, MEGA164 for the core , and it will be release in near future.