I unboxed the 1-Wire
Grid-EYE Sensor w/Arduino-Compatible PCB from Element 14 and Maxim Integrated a couple of weeks ago, took some pictures and notes, and am just now getting it written up. Everything was going along ahead of schedule and then came the last days of May with graduations, end of school functions and Memorial Day and I am suddenly dead on schedule. I had planned on doing weekly progress reports on everything, but the last one I wrote took me about 3 hours to compile and I really only planned on 5 hours a week per Road Test, so I just ditched the writing and got down to hacking. Hey, everyone is really the most interested in the main project anyway, right?
So here are the packages. The first and smaller box contained the Grid-EYE MAXREFDES130# module with a RJ11 cable for the 1-wire connection. The second box contained the 1-Wire Arduino shield.
MAXREFDES130#
MAXREFDES131#
The shield was in a good ziplock ESD bag. The ESD bag was big enough to fit the shield in with the NerO and CleO both attached. The box also contained another longer RJ11 cable. The power supply came with a world wide assortment of outlet plugs that just snap right on the face.
The USA plugs clipped right on.....
NerO installed without a hitch.
Once the CleO was attached I realized that the legs were oriented the wrong way for a tft screen.
The legs easily installed on the otherside of the shield.
However, one of the relay blocks was obscured by a leg and the board rests on the housing of the relays. This hasn't caused any problems for testing, but with a 3.5" screen installed on the NerO it would need an odd shaped housing. This is a reference design, so for its purpose it has a nice layout with all of the block and power connectors around the perimeter of the board. It all worked alright when I fired it up and installed the demo program at any rate. It seems compatible with the CleO and they seem to share the SPI bus just fine.
Looking at the documentation https://www.maximintegrated.com/en/design/reference-design-center/system-board/6332.html/tb_tab0 all seemed a little spotty. There is no outright manual in a conventional sense of a manual. There is also no pinout. The pins and jumpers seem pretty intuitive. My guess is that all pins are safe in the 0-10V 4-20mA level. The jumper seems to switch the power supply between the supplied transformer and a 24V external line(?) I had a couple of questions:
What is the 1” test strip?
What size battery for the RTC?
The desktop portion of Grid-EYE demo seems to be written in qt, but there is no source and no Linux binaries. Also, the Grid-EYE demo wouldn’t compile from the Arduino IDE on Linux. It couldn’t find one of the headers (and the header was indeed there), so maybe I can get it to compile with Eclipse. When I first made the move to Eclipse for my Arduino platform, there was an error from one of the sites that made the Arduino plugin unusable, but that seems to be fixed now. So I am in the Windows world for now, but I may need to contact support when I get a minute.
And contacting support was not as easy as it could have been. There is no email address given, support contact is initiated with a form. However, the form is a CSS element and when I switched tabs to get more precise information about what was going on, the form disappeared, along with the information I had gathered. So when I do contact them, I will be more prepared before I use the ‘form.’
The next step is to take the code from here https://github.com/MaximIntegratedRefDesTeam and port it to use the CleO for display instead of the serial line for output. I am going to use the CleO to display the Grid-EYE output. I can display the pixel data on the screen and save the raw data to the SD card. There seem to be 2 digital pins from the Arduino exposed, just needing headers soldered in place. I explored the difficulty in porting my component tester code for my other Road Test to use the MAX11300 Mixed IO but I decided that is outside of the scope and time frame for these Road Tests.
So far I am more impressed with the reference designs after playing around with them and doing my initial research than I was when I signed up for the Road Test. Now to get busy and figure out how well this Grid-EYE does when presented with a person vs an animal through various layers of window glass…..
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