Networking

Thinking on the time frame for my final project, I decided to build a network using arduinos and xbee's. On a later stage, I will explore Neils networking hello boards.
What I needet to achieve is sending wireless read outs form an 3 axis accelerometer, and possibly from a compass sensor. We started with the accelerometer because within the Waag Society, we have some experiance with that. The basic setup which I could build in the final project looked like this:

On the receiver side, I just had the xbee in its socket of the developer board connected to the computer. We made a ruby script and used the open source audio player mpg123. This was an alternative to the waveshield for arduino which we had ordered, but did not arrive in time. The only draw back in the current application is that the sounds are not played in the cube, but outside. On the other hand, in a later stage we could play the sounds in another object which can be interesting.
because we basically just needet 6 values for the directions, we scaled down the values of the xyz accelerometer to x+ y- etc, so we could attach a sound for every side of the cube.

Mesh networks: Another reason why I used xbee's for the networking was that you can have many of them in a broadcast mode. Again I want to learn how to do this with Neils hello boards. back |