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Network and Communications

This weeks class of Fab Academy 2015 was about networking and communication. I may not be a programmer, but this is a fascinating subject. I want to tackle it but I’ve heard tale that this is a tough week.

To quote Prof Niel Gershenfeld

This is a huge subject . It’s weeks, months and really years to come to master it.

ESP8266

I want to create a wireless serial communication for my final project. I’ve worked my way thru a dozen but nothing is working. I am going to have to triage this later and do something simple. The first time I sat down to chat with the ESP8266 I just fried the board. I've added a voltage diveder but I just fried another board while trying to push a firmware upgrade via the web. In my third attempt the firmware worked but

Board

So I am out of time and I am falling back to something that will work better, a simple hard coded Serial interface. I used Eagle to design a serial attiny 44 board. The board was milled on a Roland mill with a 1/64 End mill.

Fab Modules
Adding the image
Calculating the path
The boards are stuffed and fuses are set. For the first time everything seems to work. This was the first board in a long time that was fairly straight forward and worked the first try.
Fab Modules
Adding the image
Calculating the path
I modified the code and tested the button press on one that change the light on the other. It's not the most complex of interactions but I have a simple RX/TX serial communication happening on a small level. When the button is pressed on the first board it sends a message to the second board to change the LED state. It works the other direction as well. I am out of time now but will return to the project as time permits.

You can find all my source files here: Networking and Communications.

Conclusions

Networking is harder than I thought. I didn’t make it very far into where I wanted to this week, but I am happy with how far I did arrive in that I made something work although it was not the ESP8266 that I wanted to work with in my Final Project.