Week 14 - Networking

This week our goal is to make a simple network of boards that can communicate with each other.

I decided to make the boards suggested by the class page. I created 2 nodes and one master node.

I milled the boards and set about adding the many small parts to the board. When I finished I tried to program the boards, but they did not take the programming. In the past this has been a bad trace, so I took the heat gun and aimed it at my solder connections. After a bit of reflowing of the solder, I went home to work more on the project there. Once I set it up at home, everything worked.

I do not know if it was a software or a hardware problem, but it was now working. I opened a serial terminal using the Arduino development and set the baud rate to 9600. Sending the node number, caused all 3 boards to light and then the identified board to flash an additional time. I used 0, 1, and 2 for my names and they all worked, but the flash was a bit quick for me. I went in to the code and changed the delay so that it was a bit more obvious which board was flashing. The results are in the video below.

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