Background
Up to this point, aside from visual information via LCD or light interactivity via serial communication, what happened on the board stayed on the board. Now seems like a proper time to broaden the horizon a bit. I am drawn to the visual quality of networking via light and thusly chose to dive into infrared driven networking.
Network and communications posts...
- Environmental monitoring with online data logging to Thingsv | 2018 Mar 31 | 14 minute read
- Infrared networking | 2017 May 25 | 8 minute read
- Testing the electrical components of the IR network twins | 2017 May 23 | 3 minute read
Over the past few months, I have continued to develop the electronics and programming aspects of this project. I now have a system for evualating power potential and environmental sensing, and logging all that data online to Things Speak, an open Internet of Things Platform. Previous to using Things Speak, I was logging data to an SD card. However, with an SD card, I need to periodically pull the data from the card. Extra work. Using Things Speak, the data is available to me and everyone else instantly, everywhere. There have been some issues with wifi stability and internet connectivity...
Now I that I have a master-slave network setup, I would like to see if I can get the two boards to send signals back and forth autonomously. First, I extended the sensor test sketch to react via its LED and the serial monitor. I kept the serial monitor so I could debug along the way. One board is transmitting IR signals at random intervals. The other board is checking the IR receiver and when a signal is sensed, it triggers the LED on the board to illuminate for a short time period, then resumes loking. First the code for...
Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, so it is a challenge to know if the infrared LED is operational. Further, the sensors need to be operationally tested. I setup some simple arduino sketches to confirm the board. First, you need to match the ATtiny44 pins to Arduino speak. Look at this graphic and compare it to the schematic. The LED is on ATtiny 12, irLED 11 and irSensor 10. One, two, three. I will add those as integars. Now, many cameras can see infared light. The front camera on newer iPhones is one such camera. const int irPin...