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Showing posts from January, 2016

Ubilinux on the Intel Galileo: RF24Network

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Hey all, been a while. Been surprisingly busy with work and other stuff….assuming “other stuff” turns out to actually work you’ll be hearing about it In other news, I had reason to look into structured sensor nets, and naturally I turned to the nRF24 radios . More importantly, Tmrh20 also wrote RF24Network, which is a network layer for ( n )RF24 radios, with tons of interesting features. Rather than recount everything here, more details can be found here .  For a simple test, I decided to use the Intel Galileo as my “head” node (yeah, all RF24Network…networks need a master node which acts as the centre of the structure, which isn’t all that strange) and an Arduino as a single client node. I’d previously installed the RF24 library for Arduino via the Board Manager, and so I went down this route to get RF24Network as well. For the Galileo, I downloaded the RF24Network sources off of Github, extracted them, and transferred the resulting files to the Galileo. If you’d seen the previou

nRF24L01+ Radio Communications using RF24 over SPI-GPIO

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The first thought that came to my mind when I read that was: “wow, that’s a remarkably complicated-sounding name for a simple blog post”. I’m looking for replacements, so please drop a few in the comments. Anyway, back to business. The point of this post is to outline the procedures involved in using nRF24 radios (by now, you’ve realized I must really like them ) on a Raspberry Pi via a bitbanged SPI connection. Normally, you’d simply compile and install Tmrh20’s RF24 library, wire up the module the Pi’s dedicated SPI pins, and then go forth from there. However in my last post, there was the possibility that the hardware/dedicated SPI pins would be used for some other purpose ( oh I don’t know, providing wired ethernet maybe? ) and would be unavailable to do this. I then talked about the moderately-involved process of providing a software-based/bitbanged SPI peripheral which could then be used for some other purpose. This post aims to illustrate one such possibility. The RF24 librar