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Wireless Interface for E.R.I.K.A.



Antonio Mancina and Michele Cirinei

Introduction

We are working on a system to send and receive data between RCXs (hosting ERIKA Educational) and normal Personal Computers (hosting the SHaRK real-time kernel). The aim of the work is to continue using the InfraRed Interface mounted on the RCX and the IR Tower to communicate with the PC.
The first step has been the implementation of a simple protocol stack in ERIKA Educational to allow the communication through the InfraRed Interface.
The second step, currently under construction and test, is the project of a device whose goal is the translation from InfraRed to Radio Waves and viceversa, to allow a faster communication (in case of multipoint communication) avoiding the need of a Line Of Sight between units.


Infrared Interface

At the moment, RCX can communicate with other RCXs only through an easy infrared interface. We projected an easy protocol stack to allow this communication, composed of three layers:

  • Physical Layer: exports the abstraction of an InfraRed channel;
  • Data Link Layer: exports the abstraction of message transmission and reception with error checking (that is, each node can send a message of 1 or more bytes to another node);
  • Interaction Layer: exports a distributed database of 8/16 bit variables, whose values can be exchanged between the various nodes of the network.



The protocol stack has already been implemented and it is in the final testing stage. Soon (we think before the end of June), the protocol stack will be available to the public under the GPL license. Together with it, also an implementation of the protocol stack for the S.Ha.R.K. kernel will be available. Through it, RCX will be able to communicate also with a PC with the IR tower on the serial port.

IR-RF Interface

The InfraRed device shipped with the RCX has from our point of view three problems:
  • the communication is slow: the hardware allows only 2400 bps;
  • components are directional: the nodes needs a line of sight;
  • communication is point to point: it is hard to implement a communication between more than two units, also because the communication channel is half duplex.
We wanted to solve these problems using a radio frequency communication infrastructure which should be able to maintain a much higher bandwidth and can reach farther distances than IR lights.

The device is composed of three main sections:
  • InfraRed Section
  • Radio Frequency Section
  • Logic Section

InfraRed Section

The goal of this section is the reception of messages from the RCX, and the trasmission to the RCX of messages received via Radio Waves.
Transmission is an easy task, so we decided to use only an IR led with some electronic around. The reception can be difficult, especially for time constraints, so we choosed an integrated IR Receiver, set to 38 kHz pulsing IR light, the Vishay TSOP1738.

Radio Frequency Section

The goal of the Radio Frequency Section is the reception and the transmission of messages via Radio Waves.
The choice of the radio frequency transceiver have been guided by the need of enough bandwidth to reach good transfer speeds allowing, at the same time, more than one RCX to communicate without IR transmission delays. The AUREL XTR-434, which works in FM radio modulation at a frequency of 433.9 MHz, is able to reach a 100 Kbps bandwidth and represents a feasible solution.

Logic Section

The Logic Section must translate from a Section to the other. It has three main goals:
  1. receive all the messages from the RCX, through the InfraRed Section, prepare them for the transmission via Radio Waves, and send them to the Radio Frequency Section;
  2. receive from the Radio Waves Section the messages sent to the unit, prepare them for transmission via InfraRed, and send them to the InfraRed Section;
  3. implement an easy protocol to assign the shared RF channel to the units.
Due to a tradeoff between cost and power, the core of this Section is a microcontroller of the PICmicro family, PIC 16F876.

Schematic and Board

We have designed a second version of the device, trying to improve some aspects if compared to the old one. In particular final dimensions have been reduced and IR components have been placed in the center of one of the board sides. On the other hand we took some risks placing the microcontroller near to the transceiver, without respecting some use constraints imposed on the Aurel datasheet: this have not led to any kind of malfunctioning (it could be shown only some more signal noise, easily avoided by the receiving routine) and final dimension is approximately 60% of the original one. You can download schematic and board of this version, but remember they are not fully tested yet.
Schematic and board are made for Eagle. In order to use them you need 3 libraries for Eagle of some components: TSOP1738, AUREL XTR-434 and PIC 16F876.

Eagle Schematic

Eagle Schematic image



PIC Code

We have implemented a first version of the PIC program, which should control InfraRed and Radio Frequency sections. The code is not fully working, in some cases, stressing too much the protocol, one of the three units we are using stops working. You can download the original code from the Erika CVS website. To use it, you must send an initialization message via IR, which must include:

    - header composed by 0x55, 0xFF and 0x00;
    - ADD = address number of the unit;
    - MADD = maximum address number;
    - TCONST = time constant calculated as [ 0x40 / (MADD+1) ] * ADD;
    - CHK = checksum of the packet, calculated as   0xF5 + 0x03 + ADD + MADD + TCONST.

The full message will be:

0x55  0xFF  0x00  0xF5  0x0A  0x03  0xFC  ADD  ~ADD  MADD  ~MADD  TCONST  ~TCONST  CHK  ~CHK

Click here for images and movies

Final notes

Please contact the authors for other informations, or read their Master Thesis (available for download under the download page!).