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Project 13 - Networking and Communications

I learned about communicating between devices - microcontroller to computer, and also microcontroller to microcontroller. I reused the board from embedded programming - the hello echo board - but learned more about how it actually works.

Goals

Class Assignment: My Personal Goals:

Things I learned

The Process + Pics

  1. Learning the material
    2.

    Most of my work for this week was just learning how Serial Communication actually works. I started by learning about parallel vs. serial. I knew the concept vaguely, but didn't know that serial is so common because it helps save input/output pins. This makes sense, because when while designing boards, I've been having to take this into consideration. I also learned how a clock is essential in making sure each bit is read correctly.

    I learned how asynchronous and synchronous communication works. Devices, for any type of networking, must all follow the same protocols as each other, and should be configured the same way. For asynchronous communication, I learned about the data chunk, parity bits, and baud rate. I learned how to wire a serial bus - that's what I used to design my boards.

    I wasn't sure if I would need a different protocol though, and also started learning about Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). For this, I also read up a little bit about shift registers - in the future, I want to experiment with these more. For SPI, I learned how to wire up two boards with SCK, MOSI, and MISO. The concept of sending a listening command before listening is confusing, but pretty cool. I also learned about slave select; this would be useful for future circuits as well.

  2. The Boards

    3. I used Eagle to design my boards. I originally forgot that I needed to connect Voltage and ground between my boards. So I had two boards that only had two pins each for the Tx and Rx. Sigh. It was a dumb mistake, but one that I won't make again. However, because it was just voltage and ground, I decided I could just add some extra sketchy wires to the VCC and GND pins on my thermister, and on the mosfet board I was designing for my final project, remember to include the VCC and GND. Here's a picture of the two boards that each only had two pins for communication.

    Here's what the wiring looked like between the boards; it's hard to tell, but the mosfet board is connected to the thermister board. The code was a little sketchy because I don't know if the boards are communicating to each other directly or via the computer, but basically, the thermister reaching a certain temperature results in switching the mosfets off.
  3. Revisiting past weeks and SoftwareSerial
    4.

    I didn't understand Serial before, but now I do, and it made Week 7's work with the hello echo make a lot more sense (code on left, forgot to screenshot actual serial port gibberish because I was so excited when it worked). So I decided to visit that again. And since I was behind and still finishing up the thermister stuff, I set the board with SoftwareSerial (read about it more in input devices) to read the NTC values in Serial (I'm so excited it worked after two and a half weeks!).

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