April 2004, Issue 165

BasicCard 101 (Part 2):
Use in a Liquid Nitrogen Monitor

GIVE IT A TRY

I must admit that I was intrigued by the fact that these tiny BasicCards contain more resources (except for I/O) than the typical MCUs I routinely use. Furthermore, all of this capability is sandwiched into the small area under the gold contact pad. The rest of the card is just plastic filler to make the card easy to handle.

I am definitely in the compiler camp, and generally avoid MCUs like Basic Stamps, which run as interpreters. However, for this purpose, I have to admit that the BasicCard interpreter design is quite useful.

I suspect that many readers, like myself, are not quite up to the task of designing their own device drivers for high-level PC languages like Visual Basic running on Windows. It was a different story in the past, when you could easily design an ISA card, plunk it into the PC, and access it using direct in and out instructions. Now, it’s important that the device manufacturer supplies APIs that allow these compilers to easily interface to the device. ZeitControl certainly has taken care of this aspect, and it provides an extremely inexpensive development kit. For BASCOM AVR users, the necessary BasicCard drivers exist as well. So, there’s really no reason not to give this a try if you have an application in need of a secure smartcard.