Week 10 - Networking
— weekly — 1 min read
I need some communication for my final project to transfer the data I aggregate with my sensor PCB boards and the TOF sensors over to the board the will drive the LED screen. To do so, I would rather keep it simple and to a wired communication.
The goal would ideally be to retrieve the raw data from the sensor board, then to perform a manipulation based on the distance from the edge of my table to the controller and produce the index of the LED that indicates the relative location of my controller.
To do so, I designed a simple SAMD11 board that breaks out SCL/SDA pins to communicate with my sensor:
However, when I tried to upload my program to it, the VL531L1X Arduino Library was heavier than my board memory capacity. So I had to fall back to the good old SAMD21 that worked great for me the entire semester. Since I anyway need to eventually make a new one, I would rather mill now a second board:
Now the library uplaoded on this board and I am ready to try out my Serial communication. I tested the two SAMD21 boards with two different Serial connections over to the Arduino Mega board
And this worked! I was able to serial print my sensor values on my Arduino board. So to demo it, I programmed the SAMD21 board to produce the index and connected it to the Arduino board to drive some LED strips. It is really beginning to look like PONG!