Vertical Hydroponics: Blog 6 - EZR32WG Wireless Starter Kit: Part 1

I have gotten a lot done since my last post, but I don't have time to write a detailed blog at the moment. I did want to give an update on my first chance to get started with what will be the controller for this project. More to come shortly.

This Friday I received the EZR32WG 915 MHz Wireless Starter Kit. Most of my time this weekend has revolved around getting to know the hardware and software that comes with this dev kit, and so far I am pretty impressed.

I began by installing Simplicity Studio. This was a fairly painless process. Then I started up the studio and connected one of the boards to my computer. After a few minor bumps, the board showed up in the Detected Hardware section. I moved the switch on the board to the AEM position, and went to the Kit Manager. There I updated the board firmware to the latest version. This gave me the “EZR32WG 915MHz Wireless Starter Kit (###)” as the detected Hardware instead of just “J-link Debugger.”

Next, I went to the software examples section. The appropriate Kit, Part, and SDK was automatically selected for me. I wanted to try out a program that would let me use the on-board display and push buttons first so I chose the SLWSTK6222A_clock program. I loaded this program into the IDE, and used the debug command to load it onto the board. It worked! I played with this to see how the buttons worked, and observed which libraries were used.

After this I tried out the ezradio_simple_trx example program. I loaded this onto both boards. When I pushed an button on one, the other received a number. This is a very simple example, but it shows how to implement bidirectional communication on these boards.

The last example program I looked at was SLWSTK6222A_humitemp. This program reads from the on board i2c temperature and humidity sensor and displays the data on the on board screen.

After looking through these examples I decided I had enough to hack together my first program on the board. I began with the ezradio_simple_trx program and added code from the humitemp program so that one board “Node1” sent the temperature to the other board “Gateway.” With this working successfully I now have a method for sending whatever data I want from the node to the Gateway.

With this working I can move on to getting data from the Gateway to the Beagle Bone Black Webserver. The I will write code to interface with all of the sensors and relays I am using, wire up the system in an enclosure, and start to write the main control code.