Week 10: Networking and Communications

Cult Behavior

This week we were tasked with designing, building, and connecting wired or wireless node(s) with network or bus addresses. I made a Wifi connected ESP32 board with an LED.

I decided it was time to end my relationship with Eagle for electronics design. It was amicable. I've moved on to SVG-PCB (you're welcome, Leo and Quentin).

In SVG-PCB, Neil's ESP32 was magically already designed and ready to import as an example, you can find all the example boards here.I wanted to add an LED so that I could blink it over Wifi. This was easy enough to do, I checked the ESP32 datasheet to figure which pin I can connect an LED to. There are 36 GPIO pins on the ESP32 and you can connect to any available one of them. I chose pin 32 to stay on theme.

Go to import to get the parts you need in the menu. Once I had my parts I needed to trace them, which you can do in the code. Go to Add Wires section in the body, and follow your intuition in naming the part and pad number until until you have a red dot on the correct pad. Here you can drag you trace in the project window. I decided to add fillets to my traces for style~

Once my board was done, I exported it as a png, tweaked the outline in Photoshop and milled it. PRO TIP: When exporting from SVG-PCB, the png is 999.99 dpi, make sure to set your dpi to this in mods. I milled the board at 800 dpi and it ended up being a touch too big. I spent a while thinking I had the wrong ESP32.

I finished soldering the board and was ready to connect! Quentin let me use his SAMD11 dual serial to USB adapter and flashed the board. We first connected to his computer as some of my classmates had issues finding the serial port using Quentin's adapter on their Macs (what I have).

Before adding code in Arduino, I had to install the ESP32 board by going to Tools->Board->Board Manager and finding the ESP32 install. We uploaded a web_server_example code for blinking the LED in Arduino on Quentin's computer and used my iPhone's hotspot as the WiFi network. After switching the board and resetting it, we saw that it was communicating with his computer via the serial monitor. YAY!!!

I also connected to my hotspot network on my computer, and was able to see the network as Network Port. I could now program my board wirelessly ;)

Here I am blinking the LED over the server address. see u next week and Happy Thanksgiving <3