Fab Academy Ronald Postma 2015

Week #14 || Networking and Communications

Software used:

Eagle
Fab Modules

Machine used:

Roland Modela

Setbacks:

I suppose the main setback is that this week's subject was way beyond my current knowledge, and because of a crisis moment in my freelance job I could not spend very much time on the excersize this week. This means I did learn about serial communication, but I did not get to experiment with the many other ways of communication. I am happy however, because this subject is new to me anway, so this excersize was perfect for me
Another small setback was to do with soldering. I had placed the atTiny45's the wrong way around, and when I plugged in the bridge board, the smell of burned plastic reached my nose within a few seconds! After desoldering the atTiny's and putting them back the right way, all went fine. I had to replace the resistor, capacitor and atTiny of the bridge board with new components.

1. Hello.bus.45

Like I described above, I made the serial communication hello.bus.45 bridge with two nodes. The design in Eagle went very quick, I designed the boards within an hour, and it took another two hours to prepare the cutout files and cut them. Soldering was a bit troublesome, but the errors were soon fixed

I decided to put the boards on the same cutout, in order not to have a mess of tiny boards, which will surely get lost eventually.

Now the boards are assembled, and programming can begin!

2. Programming

For programming, I followed the AS220 lab tutorial. First off is the bridge board, then the two nodes. I made seperate folders for each node with the same files, but the C code modified for each node.

After flashing the boards, I used Arduino IDE to test if it works....

....it does!

Files

Click here to download the board, schematic and cut-PNG files RAR.