03/23/2018
This past week started off with a full day of working with the Semtech RF Transceiver chips. We spent a fair amount of time trying to educate ourselves on the communication protocols with the chips and settled on SPI. We went ahead and set up two chips, each with their own Arduino, so that we could verify communication. However, after spending hours trying to simply communicate from the Arduino to the chips, we were still having problems with the data we were receiving back from the chip. Since we need to move forward and integrate RF into the full system we decided to switch which RF transceiver system we are using, and ordered new transceivers that are better documented online (NRF24L01+). We will begin to integrate these into our system over the next few days.
Since we are still working on RF, we worked to create a protocol which will be used for the diagnostic functionality. These utilize the UART communication inherent to arduino’s and will enable the surgeon or physician to connect to the surgeon’s wand and send simple serial commands which will prompt a full print out of each screw id, impedance, output amplitude, and battery charge.
This past week started off with a full day of working with the Semtech RF Transceiver chips. We spent a fair amount of time trying to educate ourselves on the communication protocols with the chips and settled on SPI. We went ahead and set up two chips, each with their own Arduino, so that we could verify communication. However, after spending hours trying to simply communicate from the Arduino to the chips, we were still having problems with the data we were receiving back from the chip. Since we need to move forward and integrate RF into the full system we decided to switch which RF transceiver system we are using, and ordered new transceivers that are better documented online (NRF24L01+). We will begin to integrate these into our system over the next few days.
Since we are still working on RF, we worked to create a protocol which will be used for the diagnostic functionality. These utilize the UART communication inherent to arduino’s and will enable the surgeon or physician to connect to the surgeon’s wand and send simple serial commands which will prompt a full print out of each screw id, impedance, output amplitude, and battery charge.