A ball control on a touch screen (using a Microchip microcontroller) was realized in a laboratory in Italy. A steel ball was kept at the center of a metallic plate using FLEX board at the Retis lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. You just need a steel ball, a FLEX board (an embedded board which can be used by all the developers who want to fully exploit the potential of the latest Microchip micro-controllers: the dsPIC DSC family - see the Datasheet), two servomotors and a touch screen.

At the Retis laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, a moving ball was visually tracked using FLEX board with a CMOS camera.
Movements of a freely rolling ball was visually tracked, within the visual envelope of the CMOS camera, using FLEX board . The CMOS Camera is capable of returning JPEG images to the connected FLEX board hosting a Microchip dsPIC. The Flex Board also controls two servomotors which are used to articulate the camera, thereby maintaining the focus on the rolling ball.

This demo shows how to set up a USB connection between the PC and the FLEX board. The aim is to control the dsPIC LED and the PIC18 LED system from the host PC. The dsPIC LED is controlled by the SPI communication with the PIC18.
The application is divided into three parts:

FLEX is an embedded board which can be used by all the developers who want to fully exploit the potential of the latest Microchip micro-controllers: the dsPIC DSC family.
FLEX is born as a development board where to easily develop and test real-time applications for the Microchip dsPIC DSC micro-controller.

FLEX is an embedded board which can be used by all the developers who want to fully exploit the potential of the latest Microchip micro-controllers: the dsPIC® DSC family.
FLEX is born as a development board where to easily develop and test real-time applications for the Microchip dsPIC® DSC micro-controller. The main features of FLEX are:

* robust electronic design;

* modular architecture;

* availability of a growing number of application notes;

* the full support of the Erika Enterprise real-time kernel from Evidence Srl.

The compact and essential design allows the employment of FLEX not only for development purposes, but they make the FLEX platform a suitable solution for the direct deployment into the working environment.