Networking and Communications/ Wireless

Initially, I had made an ESP 8266 board but I had difficulty connecting to the MIT network. Even when I did connect, my connection was unstable, which would be problematic for my extruder since the robotic arm is on campus. I then made a BLE board but as soon as I plugged it in, the chip heated up and fried. This happened to several other people, which led us to conclude that they were just a bad batch of chips.

I made several WiFi boards: Neil's original, the original with an added FTDI so I could link to other boards, and a board that combined my SSR circuit with the ESP8266 circuit.

I tested each WiFi board with AT commands in the serial port and all of them worked.

I tried uploading basic scripts from Arduino but ran into a whole host of errors. After lots of troubleshooting, I discovered that the problem might be bugs in the ESP tool that writes programs to the chip. Someone wrote a python script to fix these bugs, so I downloaded it and redirected my platform.txt in my Arduino libraries to use that bootloader instead, however my Arduino was not able to execute the file.

I then tried communicating with my ESP 8266 using only AT commands in the serial port. First I tried listening in Firefly in Grasshopper, then I tried communicating to both Gary and Kyle's computers. I always received confirmation and receipt messages but never saw any of the messages show up in my terminal or my Grasshopper panel. Both Kyle and Gary were able to receive messages so I think there must be something wrong with my computer setup.