Up...and, well, just up for now.
A love hate relationship
I would like to point out that I am in now way an electrical engineer, nor is my physics in relation to electricity worth even a dime. Thus, I was so very happy when Owen explained to me how my circuits were in fact not completed and that is why my LED was not lighting up. That knowledge really lit a lightulb, both of the metaphorical and the literal variety. This is extremely symbolic of my love hate relationship with the tools with which I work on this robotics project. Circuitry is cool and all because it makes what I want to happen happen, but at the same time I am approaching it like a four year old approaches an outlet with a fork: a bit naively, excited at all the shiny objects, and completely unaware if and when a shock might occur. I also have a fear of capacitors, having been more than a little shocked by a disposable camera flash capacitor when I was...hmm I don't remember how old I was; eleven, twelve? And breadboards. They are great for what they are, but they are often times the most unorganized mess of wires I have ever seen.
Progress
Despite all these fears and misgivings, progress is being made. Sorry, still no pictures. Maybe I will get some up later. We did in fact have 418 MHz Transceiver boards by Parallax lying around the lab, two in fact, so at least we did not need to wait for a shipment to come in. Also, because they are by parallax they work well with our BASIC stamps and the PBASIC language. I spent about 5 hours in the lab yesterday hooking them all up to the breadboards and the stamps.
The hookups did not go as smoothly as I would have liked, but I chalk it all up to lack of experience with breadboards and their layout. Eventually I will get the hang of it all and clean things up a bit. My second board looks better than my first. One problem I did create was with the layout of the pins for the network library stamp. The decision has been made to make the stamp a full-fledged transceiver control and network protocol library chip. As such it needs its pins to connect to both the transceiver and any brain stamp we concoct for a robot.
The transceiver can operate in two modes. Serial mode sends 9600 baud serial information with 15 millisecond spacing between bits between the TXD pin on one transceiver to the RXD pin on any other receiving device. There is also a TXFLO pin which can handle different rates and quicker using PBASIC's built in serializing function. This stream of bits is a good source of communication but requires work on both ends to ensure parity and accuracy of data.
The transceivers can also operate in switch mode, which can send 3 bits in parallel to any similarly-addressed board. Timing is different and it seems to be an easier means of communication. All that occurs is tha output pins on the receiving end mirror the state of the input pins on the transmitting device. If an IN pin is high, so is the corresponding OUT pin on the receiver. Seems just easier to program from my point of view. I may very well be eating those words at a later date.
So that is where I stand. I have two breadboards wired with a controller chip and transceiver each, and an increasingly clean work area. I have already started to lay claim to heaps of table space in the colony lab. Next step: get the transceivers talking to each other in switch mode. We shall see how it goes.
