Relay Enable & SPI Interface - Block F
This relay enable circuits
is needed to assure that all the relay drivers and stepper motor driver
are disabled at power up. One annoying quirk of the MPC555 CPU is
the power on state of the external I/O ports. Some are pulled
high, some low, some open. The initial state of DATA6 line is
pulled high at power up. This state, along with the inverted
condition driven by U15F, will disable all relay drivers, stepper motor
drivers, and some general usage I/O to the outside world until after
the processor has booted up. One of the first orders of business
after initial boot and code loading process will be to configure the
default state of all the I/O lines of the Microcontroller. Once
configured the interfaces to the outside world can be brought up in a known state.
The three pull down resistors on the
SPI lines are there for the same type of reason. Open collector
initial state. These resistors assure that the internal serial
devices are not fed with a floating signal level.