This has been a good week with it's ups and down. During this week I have been working with three areas for the project.
SDCard interfacing:
Hardware:
Arduino Wireless SD shield. It contains a MicroSD card slot.
Micro SD card 2G FAT formatted
Software
Code from PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit Community Project#050 – SD Card Example
Progress
I was able to write data to the SDcard by using the code from PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit Community Project#050 – SD Card Example . The code works however I found that in my setting it works only on a full power cycle of the board but stop working if the board is rebooted. It gets stuck initializing the SDCard for some reason. I have been researching about SPI and SDCards, comparing code from several sources but with no luck. For now it can be used and I will use the code since it works, I may do my own SDCard board circuit so I can do an on demand power cycle for the SDCard to check if it works constantly.
Ultrasonic sensor:
Hardware:
HC-SR04
Attiny85
Software:
AVR sample
Progress:
In this specific area I have modified my original idea. Since Ultrasonic sensors are always spitting out a value, I thought this might consume a lot of resources from the PSoC and also I would like this to be compatible with different sensors. So I will be implementing a co-processor for the ultrasonic sensor. The Ultrasonic sensor will be manage with a small AVR, the Attiny85.
By using an Attiny85 I can be constantly measuring distances of objects and provide intelligence to the sensor. For example i can send a serial message from the PSoC to the Attiny with a distance threshold and receive from the Attiny85 an interrupt to log the data at that moment. Also by using this, I can latter on add a different sonar sensor without changing my PSoC code, just adding a simple smart component to the sonar sensor.
Wireless:
Hardware:
Adafruit CC3000 Wifi
Sofware:
Writing my own code
Progress:
This turn to be a very hard one to crack. It is suppose to be very simple since TI provide the libraries for the CC3000 chip. I only needed to do is to implement the SPI functions to have a full driver from the PSoC to the chip. After spending last weekend on this, I put this at a side so I can do progress with other areas and will get back to this latter on.
This has been my progress on this week, today is not over. I will be getting to burn the code on the AVR and do some soldering. Tonight goal is to have the board build and tested. The main component of my project is a GPS which was on backorder but next week it should be getting to me. Since I have code for the SDCard and Bluetooth from last week. I should be able to my first coordinates and plot them into a map. This will be very exiting on getting some coordinates in.
