26 Feb
2008
26 Feb
'08
2:53 p.m.
On Feb 26, 2008, at 2:57 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
There's still quite a bit of design involved. Microcontrollers
aren't "automatic", as I'm sure you're well aware. A
microcontroller-
based design is every bit as valid and honest as an all-discrete design.
Easy path:
two tone detectors, going to a microcontroller who
store the
data read from the tape and send it in RS232 way. A very simple AVR
microcontroller can do that ;o)
Argh!. I grew up learning to design solutions to problems, rather than
throw microcontrollers at them in the hope they'd go away. For the standard 1200/2400Hz cassette tones,
there's a very simple
circuit using a pair of monostables (one-shots) -- IIRC a single
74LS123
chip will do -- that does the decodning from the tones to a bitstream.
BTW, if you've got tone detectors (presumably one tuned to the '1'
tone,
the other to the '0' tone), why do you need a miocrocontroller to turn
the output into a bitstrea?. A few logic gates is a lot simpler.
Well, Chuck said it best, but I'll add this: You get fewer
components, lower cost, easier maintainability and tweakability,
increased flexibility, the possibility for a reusable design...how is
this a bad thing?
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL