Yeah, simply replying does nothing. You have three options:
- You can go to the blog and edit the original post because you are an author. SO you can just add stuff to the end, or whatever you want.
- You can go to the blog and post a comment to the orginal post.
- You can email me a comment and cc mik110.ts06@blogger.com almost as an afterthought. It will get sent to the blog as a new post – like I have with this post.
#1 gives you the most flexibility, but #3 is the easiest.
I think we should not re-visit using the Nordic. It's decided until we hit a snag. I'll make the code work (pissing and moaning every step of the way, no doubt) but I see no reason why it won't work… yet. If we can make it work we will have a neat device. The FCC certification seems like a good thing to have, so modules seem like a great first iteration.
Don't bother looking at the LCD stuff. It's just not worth the effort. I really wouldn't bust any guts to put extra buttons and switched on the board. I'm pretty sure I can figure some way around. After all, it only has to work once, and then I'll start hacking the code to provide feedback in the way we want anyway, I won't have all those demo messages.
As for the boot selection switches – I don't even know what you are talking about, which shows how much homework I have done. Give me a pointer.
//Mik
On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 7:33 AM, David Carkeek <dcarkeek@gmail.com> wrote:
What happens when I reply to "blogger" like I did yesterday? I think it goes into a bit bucket. This is what I wrote yesterday morning.The RayTac board is simply the Nordic chip with a Crystal and some decoupling capacitors on it and then the RF components and an antenna. If the code works on the Nordic board it will work on the RayTac board. So the next step is really to get the DW code to work on the Nordic eval board. However, if it will be too difficult to get the code to work on the Nordic chip, then we can look at putting the ST microcontroller on the Dewbly board. One reason for using a module is that it's already FCC certified. But at this point that's really not very important. On the other hand, eventually it will have to work with some kind of Bluetooth SOC if it's going to be really small. So if we spend a lot of time getting it to work with an ST microcontroller then some of that effort might be wasted.If you need buttons and a display, then we can have some kind of plug-in board with buttons and a display on it that you can use during debugging. There only needs to be enough room for a connector with enough pens on it. That could be combined with the jay tag connector. I won't know how much room there is for that until we start the board layout, but it should be possible to have something. I haven't looked at how the LCD display is driven on the DW eval board.But now I looked at the EVB schematic and see that the LCD display is on SPI: just MOSI, SCK and Select. There are two other pins, RW and SS. I will have to get the LCD datasheet to see what they do.What about the boot selection switches? Will these be needed (for debugging on the initial board)?On Sun, Jun 22, 2014 at 9:58 AM, David Carkeek <dcarkeek@gmail.com> wrote:The RayTac board is simply the Nordic chip with a Crystal and some decoupling capacitors on it and then the RF components and an antenna. If the code works on the Nordic board it will work on the Raytech board. So the next step is really to get the DW code to work on the Nordic eval board. However, if it will be too difficult to get the code to work on the Nordic chip, then we can look at putting the ST microcontroller on the Dewbly board. One reason for using a module is that it's already FCC certified. But at this point that's really not very important. On the other hand, eventually it will have to work with some kind of Bluetooth SOC if it's going to be really small. So if we spend a lot of time getting it to work with an ST microcontroller then some of that effort might be wasted.If you need buttons and a display, then we can have some kind of plug-in board with buttons and a display on it that you can use during debugging. There only needs to be enough room for a connector with enough pens on it. That could be combined with the jay tag connector. I won't know how much room there is for that until we start the board layout, but it should be possible to have something. I haven't looked at how the LCD display is driven on the DW eval board.On Jun 22, 2014, at 2:41 AM, Blogger <no-reply@blogger.com> wrote:I started looking through the DW code. It looks pretty well written and reasonably documented. However it is going to take me quite a few man-days to get into all the corners and figure out how it all works. So my first step is to configure eclipse so that I can compile, load and run their demo code on the STM32F10x. This process is fairly well documented too.The next step might seem to be to port their demo code to whatever BLE chip we use (Lets assume RayTac). It looks straightforward in principle. I'm really not sure how to connect the DW eval kit to the RayTac, or even if this is feasible, but I'll need a lot of DC help to do that. Even so much of the ancillary code assumes access to buttons and LCD. This code will have to be unpicked, and I'll have to find some other way to display their feedback messages, and somehow do without buttons. I'm hoping I can use the SWD channel I have tried so hard to get working. Of course the standard C config will be different for the RayTac chip (at least in some minor ways), so I'm sure that there will be anomalies that I'll have to sort out there too.I said the next step seems to be to port their code to the RayTac. But it would be a smaller step if I could attach the DW rig to the Nordic eval board I just received from Nordic. It will mean changing the DW code to use the right SPI pins, but it has lights and buttons that I know how to use already, and I have it configured to use the SWD channel for debugging messages. That small step would allow me to figure out the differences between the STM32F10x processor and a BLE processor without changing more than I have to. Again though, I'm not sure the DW eval kit can be connected to the Nordic EK, and I'd need a lot of help from DC to figure this out.I'm not really sure what the following step will be. It might be logical to move code onto our hardware, but there's a lot to be said for starting to write our own app (the one that uses both BLE and DW) on the Noridc+DW eval hardware – making sure that it all works in some way, before leaping off onto the TS06 Dewbly. I think a lot depends on when the h/w shows up, and how hard it is to do the previous steps. I like small steps!I notice that DW assumes that it can get access to the SPI for extended periods without being interrupted. This might cause some issues.
//Mik
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Posted By Blogger to TS06 "Dewbly" at 6/22/2014 02:41:00 AM