News Release from: Mosaic Industries
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 8 August 2005
Handheld platform hosts bespoke instruments
The Mosaic Handheld is a novel smart platform for designing custom portable instruments.
Note: Readers of the Editor’s free email newsletter will have read this news when it was announced. . It’s free!
The Mosaic Handheld is a novel smart platform for designing custom portable instruments. The Mosaic Handheld is ideal for prototyping and manufacturing portable instruments for data logging, inventory management, data acquisition, sensor calibration and scientific instrumentation. When designing a new portable device, the job of integrating the battery charger, switching power supplies, user interface, embedded computer and board-to-board interconnects in a compact enclosure consumes a huge amount of engineering effort.
The Mosaic Handheld solves all these problems, reducing the time to market and providing an elegant platform that allows OEMs to concentrate on their application.
The Mosaic Handheld integrates a graphics display, keypad with customisable overlay, processor, memory, analogue and digital I/O, serial communications, an expansion I/O bus, rechargeable batteries, power conditioning and battery charger circuitry in a rugged handheld enclosure.
A DB-25 connector at the bottom of the instrument allows the user to connect external signals to the instrument.
A built-in personality board makes it easy to route internal and external I/O and data signals inside the instrument, and includes a prototyping area to simplify the addition of custom circuitry.
Up to four I/O expansion modules called wildcards can be plugged inside the instrument to customise the Handheld for a particular application.
The rugged plastic enclosure is small enough to fit comfortably in a hand but large enough to hold custom circuitry, sensors and actuators.
Combining a high-contrast 3.4in diagonal display and 4 x 8 keypad, the Mosaic Handheld comes with software that makes it easy to control applications using menus, graphs, and bitmapped images.
The processor board inside the Handheld hosts a 16MHz Motorola 68HC11F1 microprocessor, 512Kbyte Flash and 128Kbyte RAM (expandable to 1Mbyte Flash and 512Kbyte RAM), and 320byte of EEPROM.
Onboard I/O includes eight digital I/O lines with counter/timer capabilities, eight analogue inputs, a fast synchronous SPI serial interface, and dual RS232/485 ports.
An optional real-time clock tracks the calendar and time of day and battery backs the 128Kbyte RAM.
The Handheld can operate up to 10 hours on its six rechargeable batteries.
For non-battery-powered applications it can be run from 15 to 26V DC via the power jack or through the DB-25 connector on the bottom of the unit.
• Mosaic Industries: contact details and other news
• Other news in Stand-Alone Instruments
• Email this news to a colleague
•
• RSS news feed for Mosaic Industries
• RSS news feed for Stand-Alone Instruments
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Copyright © 2000-2006 Pro-Talk Ltd, UK. Based on news supplied by Mosaic Industries - Subject: Mosaic Handheld