Sam Spaulding

Week 12: Output Devices - Communications + Networking Devices

Networking Devices Together

I was busy traveling this week, but still managed to get in a little project work done at Yale's excellent new Center for Engineering Innovation and Design in New Haven. After talking with Raj at the design session, I settled on a control architecture for my final project and started working on how to get the different parts talking to each other.

I resurrected my touch-board from the input devices week and set out to decode the messages it was sending via serial. From a careful reading of Neil's code, I knew that the example was using its own software "bit-banging" protocol rather than a dedicated hardware UART for serial. Rather than try and rewrite it from scratch, I burned the Arduino bootloader onto the ATTiny 44 by following this tutorial from Hi-lo Tech so I could use the SoftwareSerial Library to communicate over ordinary pins.


Serial Communication b/w boards
I hooked voltage up to voltage, ground to ground and the specified pin 13 for the Fabduino to receive data and pin 8 for the sense board to write out of. Then, the ATMEga 168's dedicated UART relays what was said back to the computer. When I fire up the serial communication on the computer, it reports which board is being touched!


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