Air Quality Egg -- Part Two

Now we start to get into some details.  For this part we're going to cover quite a bit.

• Connect the Egg (both the Base and the Remote Stations) to my computer using FTDI cable
• Get the AQE code from GitHub and upload that software onto both Eggs using the Arduino IDE
• Look at the serial output
• Hack the Egg, just a bit

Connecting the Egg to FTDI

What is FTDI?
FTDI is a company called "Future Technology Devices International". It's also the name of a chipset (from that company) that converts serial RS-232 connections to USB. This is really handy because computers have USB connections and boards like the Arduino, the Nanode -- even network devices like Cisco and Juniper switches and routers -- all have serial connections.

The ends of the FTDI cable I use look like this:

The first thing to do is hook up the FTDI cable to the computer and then the Egg. Actually we'll have to hook up the cable to Nanode boards for both the Base Station and Remote Station Eggs.

You can watch the videos from Wicked Devices to see how to update the main boards of your Egg.

Setup and configuration
Downloading the Arduino environment and the Egg code from Github
Reprogramming your device
[These videos are best found at the Wicked Devices AQE FAQ page: AQE FAQ.]

If you look at the "How do I update my egg" section you'll also see there's a special bit about using an ISP to update the "extra" things attached to your Egg's Nanode boards. I'll cover some of that later, too. Mostly to walk through the instructions so people can get another point of view. For now we're going to keep it simple though. Feel free to read up on that of course!

I'll try to cover details here that might help. In the future I plan on rewriting a lot of this as a How-To guide after taking a look at what is confusing about the process for newcomers.

The USB end plugs into one of your computer's USB ports. You may or may not see some information about "installing new hardware". When you do you can see what COM port the cable is assigned to. I will describe more about figuring out how your cable is assigned to a communications serial port later -- I'll describe both Ubuntu and Windows 7.

As it turns out during the next steps as long as you're only using a single FTDI cable guessing (using the Arduino IDE) which port to use is as easy as anything. Feel free to Google for more details -- be aware that sometimes the COM port will show up oddly in Windows device manager.

Now plug the cable into the Egg's Base Station Nanode board. Remember from the first post:

It's important that the right color be on the proper side of the connection. The writing is small so I've enlarged it in the next picture. The label on the board says "black" and that's the side the black wire needs to be on.

Now your Egg is connected to your computer!

The next part is to get the Arduino IDE working. Best to just head to Arduino -- Getting Started and follow their instructions for your platform.

For the moment I'm also going to assume you also followed the videos from Wicked Devices for getting their code from GitHub. For clarity I'm going to go over what files to use to get started though.

Get the code from the Air Quality Egg page [currently at https://github.com/jmsaavedra/Air-Quality-Egg]. Look for the "Download Zip" link.

Unzip the files somewhere you want to work with them. Once that's done take a look:

First off the folders for the project:

As noted for starters you'll only use one of the two folders. The AQEBase folder is for the Base Station Egg -- the one plugged into Ethernet. The AQERemote is for the Remote Station Egg that has all the sensors connected to it.

In the next steps we'll use the code in each of those folders. Here's the files in the AQEBase folder. Note you'll be opening the .ino file with your Arduino IDE.

And the same for the AQERemote:

In the next post I'll show the Arduino IDE and go over the few steps it takes to update your Egg. Again, I'm going to assume you watched the videos above. At a later time I may post details to help clarify confusing info.

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