Sweet sweet success
So i have literally spent my entire day from the time i got up this morning until now working on my radio transmitter and radio receiver to be employed in my in situ game/sculpture location system. After many failed attempts and dead ends, finally IT WORKS the way it is suppose to. I did however have to break down and employ two arduino MCU's, one for transmitting and the other for receiving.
I had originally planned to have only an MCU in the locating device with receiver and to build a stand alone battery powered circuit with transmitter embedded in the "gameboard". I spent the majority of my time today trying to make that setup work. I thought that if i used a 555 IC timer configured to continually "ping" the data pin of the transmitter that i could than tell the receiver to listen for this "pinged" data. Here is a picture of the 555 setup (w/o transmitter):
I attempted executing this method several different ways, the problem always being that it was too difficult to filter the data from the noise, especially because I wasn't 100 percent certain what data the 555->transmitter was sending. I assumed it would be a value between 1 to 2 volts which in the ardunio serial monitor would appear as values between about 30 to 70. Even when i constrained these values it was still too unreliable to tell if i was actually getting the transmission or noise.
So finally i broke down and employed two arduino MCUs, one running code for transmitting, the other running code for receiving. I also created a stand alone power supply so i could attempt moving the transmitter out of range and check the results:
This method worked really well and after some tweaking to the code I was finally able to get the receiving arduino to provide a consistent output, in the form of turning on an LED and keeping it on, when the transmitter was in range and turning it off when the transmitter was out of range.
So from a cost/benefit analysis this method of TX/RX is not ideal considering I must use two arduinos and theoretically 4 in total if I want one in each of the three planned in situ sculptures, but it works now for the purposes of demonstrating the game system.
I had originally planned to have only an MCU in the locating device with receiver and to build a stand alone battery powered circuit with transmitter embedded in the "gameboard". I spent the majority of my time today trying to make that setup work. I thought that if i used a 555 IC timer configured to continually "ping" the data pin of the transmitter that i could than tell the receiver to listen for this "pinged" data. Here is a picture of the 555 setup (w/o transmitter):
I attempted executing this method several different ways, the problem always being that it was too difficult to filter the data from the noise, especially because I wasn't 100 percent certain what data the 555->transmitter was sending. I assumed it would be a value between 1 to 2 volts which in the ardunio serial monitor would appear as values between about 30 to 70. Even when i constrained these values it was still too unreliable to tell if i was actually getting the transmission or noise.
So finally i broke down and employed two arduino MCUs, one running code for transmitting, the other running code for receiving. I also created a stand alone power supply so i could attempt moving the transmitter out of range and check the results:
This method worked really well and after some tweaking to the code I was finally able to get the receiving arduino to provide a consistent output, in the form of turning on an LED and keeping it on, when the transmitter was in range and turning it off when the transmitter was out of range.
So from a cost/benefit analysis this method of TX/RX is not ideal considering I must use two arduinos and theoretically 4 in total if I want one in each of the three planned in situ sculptures, but it works now for the purposes of demonstrating the game system.
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