Networking + Communications

This week was networking and communications, our assignment was to build a wired and/or wireless network with at least two nodes. Since I am currently swamped with final studio projects and finals, I decided to use the basic Bus demo and learn from that.

I attempted three boards that are suppose to talk to each other in an asynchronous bus with one bridge (main board) and two nodes (accompanying boards). The main board communicates with the computer via serial FTDI/USB. Using Arduino’s built-in terminal interfaces, you can control the boards using numbers assigned to the nodes (0,1, 2) and the associated LED should blink twice, while the other two would blink once.

So if you send a “1” to the serial monitor interface, and all boards should blink their LEDS, but Node 1 should blink twice, the same would happen if send a “2” it would blink twice and the others just once, and so on.

So yeah, all of this sounds simple and straightforward but by the end I didn’t completely master this task.

Workflow: I used Neil’s board layouts, I know we were suppose to design our own but with limited time, I actually wanted my project to work this week so that was the optimal decision. Using the hello.bus.45.bridge and hello.bus.45.node templates I milled my boards. The milling and stuffing went rather smoothly. My soldering skills are definitely improving and I was able to get all 3 boards soldered in record speed for me (1.5 hours).

I programmed the board using Arduino and the code provided. No problems! I assigned node number 0 to the bridge and changed the node ID number to 1 and 2 for the two nodes. Then I ran into trouble, I could not get the usb to pick up from the FTDI cable. The only responsiveness I was got was a few time (twice) when I plugged in, and on my bridge board the LED quickly flashed a light, but then quickly turned off. After troubleshooting and asking around lab I was not able to troubleshoot my problem. When I would attempt to grab the usbserial ID to communicate with my device using term.py I would get the same message “no such file or directory”

So once again another week of trying to make my boards work but no luck! I am planning to figure this out over the break because I would really like to use an output device that I can communicate with via my computer using some sort of wireless connection.