Week 13
Networking and Communication
Assignment -Design and build a wired &/or wireless network connecting at least two processors
This week we began with a discussion in our Fab Lab Wellington group where we decided to try and make a serial bus network where we can all plug into the same network and where we could all use similar things that we made from output week as something to communicate with.
A good explanation on what a serial bus network is:
We did this because only Daniel was wanting to use network and communication week for his final project and doing something similar to what we were doing was going to be helpful from him, also Daniel has a massive knowledge in the field having an engineering degree in network communication so we all agreed on what we would do.
We started by writing down a RFC2119
An RFC2119 is;
An RFC is authored by engineers and computer scientists in the form of a memorandum describing methods, behaviours, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems. It is submitted either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or (occasionally) engineering humour. The IETF adopts some of the proposals published as RFCs as Internet standards.
The reason we wrote down this was to give us some criteria for what we wanted to achieve and make it was possible for an outside person to be able to read this and be able to work in our network. It is a strict set of instructions that each of the hosts use to communicate with each other and make sure there are not any problems.
We each divided up individual outputs so we all had different outputs to make noises, light up and move. Jasmin and I were going to use a servo motor, Craig was going to use a speaker and Ben was going to use a LED. Daniel the networking wizard was going to make a Wellynet library for us which he has upload to Github.
Firstly I took my board that I used for servo motor week. TRhe first problem I had was that board was running on 1MHz with an Attiny44 and wasn't compatible with the Wellynet network because it needed to run at 20MHz.
Jasmin had a similar problem and we figured out that we could disconnect my servo motor and use an LED on a breadboard instead using the signal and Mosi line from my servo motor board to work with the network.
I disconnected the servo and hooked it up to a breadboard with a LED and ran a simple blink test to make sure that I had the correct lines hooked up and that it would work when I went to run it in the network.
Once I had this I then used an Arduino Uno as my network host board as I hadn't made my Babedunio yet. I also used AnnaÕs board as a switch which was going to be the input for when I wanted my LED to turn off and send the message over the network.
I hooked all three of the boards together, the Uno, AnnaÕs input board and my servo board with an LED attached. I downloaded Daniel's files from Github and loaded these into the library of my Ardunio IDE on my computer and uploaded these to the Uno. I then used AnnaÕs switch as an input to send a message to my board to turn my LED on and when I triggered the switch my LED started flashing! This was awesome to see how the boards could communicate with each other.
In my final projects page I show the Babedunio working with an input and output device.
Here is a little video of them working: