Contents
- 3 Project Progress
Supervisor
Project Summary
Bluetooth SMART™ or Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) is a fully featured, layered, communication protocol that includes a 2.4 GHz Radio, a link layer and an application layer. PSoC 4 BLE is an easy-to-use, ARM® Cortex™-M0 based, single-chip solution which integrates programmable analog front ends, programmable digital peripherals, CapSense® technology for touch-sensing, and a Bluetooth® LE (Low Energy) or Bluetooth Smart radio. It is Bluetooth 4.1 qualified and certified. The CY8CKIT-042 PSoC 4 Pioneer Kit provides an easy access to the PSoC 4 BLE and PRoC BLE devices.
In this part of the project we are aiming at performing different experiments with the kit to see its feasibility for the Pipeline inspection project.
However, we will not only repeat the existing examples that come with the kit, but we will put our own touch to give different functionality
Project Progress
The Electronic Guide Dog
This simple project is designed to participate in the PSoC pioneer challenge sponsored by Cypress Semiconductor and Arrow Electronics.
A guide dogs is a great assistant for blind people. We believe that new technologies can provide similar assistance. Our project, the Electronic Guide Dog, demonstrates how PSoC4 BLE kit can be used to help a blind person to avoid collisions with surrounding people in dark places, and how it can help him to find objects that are not near to him. We hope that the project will drag the attention to use such technology for impaired persons.
We used PSoC and PRoC modules for Bluetooth communication, Look Up Table for decision making, ADC to measure light intensity, PWM for alarm signal, UART for communication with PC, and control and status registers for information exchange.
However, to put this project in its final form, we need external devices that we don't have, so we represented their functionality by the kit's RGB LEDs.
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CapSense Slider experiment
This experiment demonstrates the CapSense component configured with Linear Slider. The HUE of the Tri-color LED (installed on the board) displays the scanning results of Linear Slider.
Our touch
The original example allows the user to change the brightness of the LED by sliding his finger over the CapSense Slider. This Tri-color LED can be programmed to give a combination of RGB colors.
We used the user switch (attached to the board) to allow the user to toggle between the three basic colors Red, Green, & Blue. At the same time he can use the slider to change the brightness of the selected color
CapSense Slider Tuner experiment
We studied the CapSense slider using the Tuner GUI. The Tuner GUI is a tool that helps to study the slider's parameters in more details and interactively. It can show the SNR, Finger and Noise threshold for each segment, Gesture properties. Moreover, graphical representation can be used to show finger movements over the slider. It after finishing your tuning, it can give suggestions on how to adjust the slider's parameter's for better performance
No touch
FindMe experiment (Bluetooth)
This experiment utilizes the BLE Find Me Profile. We used CySmart to show connectivity with the kit and how its attributes and characteristics can be retrieved. The system is configured as follows:
1- Connect the board and upload the FindMe example
2- Connect the dongle to another PC. A USB hub was used to facilitate handling
3- Note that the board and the dongle cannot be connected to the same PC; otherwise, a port conflict will exist and CySmart will not be able to detect the dongle. So, the board got its power by being connected to another PC
4- The Green LED (on the board) is switched ON during the advertisement phase. Once it is detected by CySmart, the LED
5- If the board was not detected for a long time it goes to a DeepSleep mode and the LED turns Red
No touch
Proximity Sensor with I2C communication experiment
This experiment shows the proximity sensor capabilities of the kit. A wire formed as a loop is attached to the board to detect the proximity of a near object. The LED brightness is inversely proportional with the distance; the less the distance (i.e. nearer) the more the brightness. The Bridge Control Panel tool is used to watch the sensor's data.
Our touch
Instead of using UART communication (as in the original example), we used the I2C communication protocol to communicate with the kit.
UART communication experiment
It is essential to find a way to communicate with the board, so we started this experiment to study the UART communication
capabilities. We did not use any examples. This experiment is our own work.
Our touch
In this experiment we implemented a simple echo firmware. The kit receives a character from the PC then it sends it back through a UART connection. on the PC side we used Putty terminal emulator to connect to the kit. Our design is based on the UART (SCB) component. To get a successful connection, you must adjust the baud rate to be the same in the SCB component, putty session, and the COM port assigned to the kit (see windows device manager). We used baud rate = 9600
UartPutString() was used to print a string at the beginning of the connection, then we used UartGetChar() to read a character from the emulator (this function returns 0 on error or no data) . If the read operation is successful the character is returned back to the emulator
Finite State Machine and Look Up Tables experiment
In this experiment, we studied the Look Up Table (LUT) component. It allows us to implement a Finite State Machine (FSM) without implementing a FSM code in the firmware. We used a 4 state FSM (Red, Green, Blue, & White), where the transition event comes from the kit's push button. The LED color changes according to the current state. Moreover, we used the Putty terminal emulator to track state transitions
External resources
100 Projects in 100 Days (PSoC4)
