GP-6 PWM Kit

PWM allows microcontrollers to dim lights, control motor speeds, and generate analog voltages. With the GP-6 kit you can bring this same powerful PWM to your PC.

This kit is a PAK-Vc mounted on a printed circuit board along with a clock and RS-232 connection. You can control 8 channels of PWM by sending simple commands via the serial port.

Key Links

	Manual
	PAK-Vc (base chip)

The GP-6 offers 8 simultaneous PWM outputs with no overhead from the host computer. You simply send commands via ordinary RS232 protocol and the onboard PAK-Vc generates PWM until you tell it to stop. By default, the board accepts 9600 baud serial data, but with a simple change, you can also accommodate 2400 baud. You can even gang up to 32 boards together to control up to 256 outputs from a single RS232 line!

Perfect for robotics project, motion controllers, or anywhere you need to generate analog voltages with 8-bit resolution. These boards are perfect for lighting applications since they can dim an LED or other light source (with appropriate drivers, of course).

Any programming language that can output serial commands can control the GP-6. You can download a Visual Basic program (here are the project files). If you don't have Visual Basic, you can download a (very large) full install package at pak5pc.zip. Here's the program in action:

The program uses the MSCOMM32 control and the heart of it is just this simple:

  MSComm1.Output = Chr(&H21) & Chr(dutycycle)

You can read more about this program in the document library.

Here's some code (courtesy of Dick Zimmer) for controlling the GP-6's PAK in QuickBasic:

        OPEN "com1: 9600,n,8,1,cd0,cs0,ds0" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
        PRINT #1, CHR$(&H85)           'reset
        top:
        FOR B1 = 0 TO 255
          PRINT #1, CHR$(&H27); CHR$(B1)
          SLEEP 1                        'wait 1 second
        NEXT
        GOTO top

GP-6 complete kit ~~$44.95~~ Sale $33.95

Serial cable (DB9 female to male, 6') $8.99