Vita in motu!

By Svetlana Ershova March 18, 2016 Edition CHIC 2015-2016Discover Tikku project

It is time to talk about the “dark” engineering side of Tikku…

Last Thursday the development kits arrived and Szabi – the electrical engineer started to code some of the low-level functionalities.
First, he set up the USB debugging possibility and managed to read the measurement data from the sensor that are on the development board. We won’t use the same sensors in the final application but using this board allowed a fast and cheap prototyping and the two solutions are quiet similar, so moving from one to other shouldn’t be really difficult.
The second step was to set up the Bluetooth communication between the board and a smartphone. He modified an existing sample application from the producer. We had several problems both with the hardware and software, but finally Szabi managed to make it work. What you can see now on the video https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8vqhPR5LZota3hEZzY5T2JobXc , is that the board measures the acceleration data, transmits to the smartphone through Bluetooth and based on the measured orientation of the board it changes the orientation of the displayed cube. It’s a simple example, but it was good to test at least that the Bluetooth communication works.
Beside he also started to work on the schematics and examined the possible solutions of the power supply and selected components for that. Concerning the charging part, a standard USB charger will be selected. It allows the user to use the standard cables, and their will be no need to carry an extra charger or other device.