Week 13: Molding & Casting

Group Assignment: .................

Individual Assignment: .............

Plan for the week:

• Thursday: review lecture and learn more from other videos, documentation and asking questions.
• Friday: make initial plan for the individual assignment, connected to final project.
• Monday: make that board, document it
• Tuesday: program that board, document it
• Wednesday: completion

Communication Methods

UART / Asynchronous

UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. It is a wired method of communication, a key point is it is Asynchronous which means the data sent is not monitored or coordinated by a clock. Instead, there is a pre-existing agreement about the 1) data length, 2) start/stop bits, and 3) speed of transmission. This allows for the data to be transferred with precision.

For communicating between multiple devices using UART we can employ "hop-counting" or "broad-hopping". Basically these are methods to count the devices in the network, give them addresses, as well as communicate with them. Here is a screenshot of the concept from Dr. Neil's previous lecture illustrating the concept.

Its a little difficult to understand precisely how it is all working, but important to try. Anyway, this section is about Asynchronous communication which again means that it is not coordinated by a clock. Instead the line is held on high, and at any time a device in the network may start transmitting.

I2C / Synchronous

In contrast, I2C and other types of synchronous communication use time when transmitting. For I2C in particular, there are 2 lines, namely SDA (Serial Data) and SCL (Serial Clock), and they work in conjunction.