Week 11
Networking and Communications
This week's assignment: design, build, and connect wired or wireless node(s) with network or bus addresses
This week, I did more work towards my final project. I want my wand to communicate via Bluetooth to some LEDs, so I created two PCB boards with ESP32s - one for the wand with an IMU and one for the lamp with an LED strip. For the wand, I used Neil's basic ESP32 board and added an IMU and a RGB LED. It's basically a combination of my board from week 9 and Neil's board. I messed up the first time because I connected SCL and SDA to the pins numbered 21 and 22 on the ESP32 footprint instead of pins GPIO21 and GPIO22. I couldn't figure out how to route everything, so I just used jumper wires for those connections.
The LED board was even simpler - I used Neil's board and added 3 breakout pins to be connected to my LED strip. I wanted fairy lights rather than the typical LED strip for my final project, so I got these. They use the WS2812B LED as the base, so they can still be programmed with the Adafruit NeoPixel library. I really like them because they are much more shapeable than the strips.
I used the ESP NOW protocol to communicate between the two boards via Bluetooth. I followed this excellent tutorial to set up the code. Unfortunately, I did not keep copies of my code at various stages of my final project, so please check my final project page for the final code that includes the code for communication via ESP NOW. The communication works well and can send messages from a reasonable distance, although it is a little slow to receive the messages.