Is one way, many-to-one communication possible between multiple Wixels? In my ideal setup I’d have multiple wixels serving as remote A/D’s for various sensors, and I’d transmit that sensor information back to a central Wixel, potentially attached to an audrino+Wixel shield+ethernet shield for logging or transmission out to the web. Is this kind of communication possible with Wixels?
Thanks.
Hello, csd6024.
One way, many-to-one communication is possible with multiple Wixels, and we provide a pair of apps for the Wixel that do most of what you want: the wireless_adc_rx app and the wireless_adc_tx app.
You can read about them and see the source code here:
github.com/pololu/wixel-sdk/blo … s_adc_tx.c
github.com/pololu/wixel-sdk/blo … s_adc_rx.c
We don’t provide precompiled versions of these apps yet, so you’ll have to follow the instructions in the “Writing Your Own Wixel App” section of the Wixel User’s Guide to download the Wixel SDK and compile them.
Please note that some packets might be lost.
The wireless_adc_rx app sends the data to the computer via its virtual COM port, so you can look at the data on a PC and see if it is adequate for what you need.
If it is adequate, then you should be able to pretty easily modify the wireless_adc_rx app to send the data to one of the Wixel’s UARTs instead of to USB. Then the data can be read by your Arduino or some other serial device.
I haven’t looked carefully at the Arduino Ethernet Shield so I don’t know whether it is compatible with the Wixel Shield.
What kind of processing are you going to do on the Arduino? You could probably do that processing on the receiving Wixel instead, take the Arduino out of the picture, and just use an ethernet-to-TTL-serial converter.
Alternatively, if you can incorporate a PC/laptop into your system, that machine could read the data from the Wixel over USB and also handle the networking.
This sounds like a cool project so let us know how it goes!
–David
