Networking and communications

For this week I am doing to work on with I2C (inter-intergrated circuit) , I2C is pronounced I square C. The benifits of this inter connection is to share the work load of one processor with another if we want more processing performance or communicate over certain distance through wires. This communication protocol is used to network and communicate among the main board also called "master" or bridge and other electronic components so called node or "slave" in almost all the embedded electronic system. Since its samilar to the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), it is only intended for short distance communications within a single device and it only requires two signal wires(i.e Tx and Rx) to exchange information.

The master/bridge generate bus clock and initiate the communication on the bus, slaves/node devices then respond to the commands on the bus(whcih means on the same connection). In order to communicate with specific device, each slave/node device must have an address which is unique on the bus.

I2C master/bridge devices (usually microcontrollers) don't need an address since no other (slave/node) devices will sends commands to the master/bridge. The address is specified on the code.


Desiging the board


I have reffered Neil's board design for this work. I added all the components and made some simple changes.


Tragedy and Sharing

Due to some issues with the milling machine, my board failed as the traces came off as my traces became too thin and also I forgot to save the eagle file.

Instead of doing the process again, I borrowed board from one of my friend and used his board to do the networking



Arduino CODE

I have used this CODE coded by Neil.


NEXT step

The Rx and Tx of the FTDI along with VCC and GND is used and after that USB port is selected from the arduino IDE and than Serial Monitor is used to sent signal. O is defined in the code so when we press zero we sould see a blink on the boards. Though as interesting as this is, this is very new to me so when help of friends and mentor, I got bits of knowledge on it but still very basic.

video here

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