Week Twelve – Networking and Communications

Hello Bus (flashing light)

Build a wired &/or wireless network with at least two nodes.

I still want to build a fab radio, but had too much going on this week. I used Neil’s hello bus, taking the boards from the class site. Milling and stuffing went without a hitch and all three boards took code first try.

Unbelievable.

The big news his week was that I finally got Arduino and the Fab ISP working on my macbook air. After trying resetting parameter ram and a whole host of other options, it occurred to me that I didn’t specifically installing FTDI drivers. Sure enough.

The first node (0) worked perfectly, but the other two stayed on. I tried running the makefile on each again (don’t know why I thought that would make a difference). I wondered if it was a cable issue, but I had checked the cable with a multimeter immediately after making it.

At exactly the moment I considered it that it might be the bus connector on the bridge, I inadvertently broke it off. I had only soldered two of the pads: the vcc and gnd.

I added jumpers to replace tracks, but could not get the board to work at all.

So I remade the board. Still no joy so I restarted Arduino.

Success!!