WEEK 15 / 10May

networking and communications

Assignment

This week's assignment was to design and build a wired or wireless network connecting at least two processors, making use of identity and addressing.

Project description

I used the circuit board that I designed on lecture 6 to develop a wireless Network using a pair of Xbee Pro from Digi to communicate the data obtained from a the gesture sensor APDS-9960 to another card that process the data and sets a PWM Value for the LED strip.

Xbee configuration network configuration

To configure the Xbees I used a tutorial I’ll leave the link below

Xbee tutorial

The Xbee board connection

The numbers on the board diagram correspond to the pin numbers of the Xbee

NOTE the Xbee connection it's the same in the two boards!!

for the board that has the gesture sensor you will have to connect the SCL, SDA, VCC and GND pins of the sensor as indicated in the following figure

The gesture sensor

he sensor communicates using I2C protocol with a micro-controller in this case I used an ATmega328 3.3V, 8 MHz. The micro-controller process the information and sends proximity values from 0 to 255 to the monitor serial and also dims an LED strip depending on the proximity values. This sensor can also recognize different gestures like passing your hand upwards, downwards also movements to the left and right, and ambient light data.

The gesture sensor program (transmitter)

This is the program for the board that has connected the gesture sensor, this program reads the values from the sensor and sends a value wirelessly to the other board using serial communication.

The LED driver program (receiver)

This is the program for the board that sets the output for the LED strip, this receives serial data and sets a PWM value that controls the strip intensity.

Testing the network communications