His guys
Just wanted to give a heads up to those of us not very electronically minded that want working PR counters on a budget, and suitable for a beginner to wire up.
I found this little beauty for about £7 that would be perfect. This thing is also totally stand alone, just wire up a battery, on/off switch and a couple of buttons and your good to go :thumbsup
The board measures approximately 24.13mm by 33.28mm. The display is KCDC03-106 0.3" display (datasheet:
http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1446052.pdf). It is positioned approximately 0.5mm from the nearest short edge and 5.5mm from the nearest long edge (away from the header pins). The header pins are 0.1" spaced.
And now the technical bit for the savvy of us....
The device has 9 digital inputs. 8 of them are also digital outputs, and a couple are analogue inputs. So, it could support up to 9 directly connected buttons, or a matrix of 20 (4x5) buttons, for example.
The core of the device is the PIC16F1507 microcontroller (datasheet
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/41586A.pdf ) which, while not as powerful as the Arduino, can do many of the same things. Programming it, however, is harder than an Arduino. All the example code created so far is in assembly, which is very very different to working in the C code for the Arduino.
For the code writers among us, a PICkit3 programmer is required, as there is no bootloader of similar facility for programming it through other means.
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The best part of the deal is, the seller will Pre program the display if he has enough info on how it should behave, so I've decided to get one, and I'm working with him so a decent PR counter code template exists that can be tinkered to personal tast he can work with. I'll then release the sellers details so anyone else that wants to have one for their PR can get one (just saves him getting multiple requests for making the same coding before its finished).
So, talking of coding/display behaviour, I was thinking of using a reed switch/magnet setup, or micro switch, for the magazine so if it's removed (regardless of the number(s) displayed at the time), it will drop to 00. Put the magazine back in, and it displays the last numbers shown before the magazine was removed. I thought it would be a nice touch, like a quick visual check and reinsert you see troops do sometimes. I was going to leave the reset to be activated by the magazine button only when the counter runs down to 00 from the trigger button, thus simulating a reload.
Anyone know the counter/fire rate (i.e delay time between numbers displayed as they count down)?